


Parley

by SkinIsCrawling



Category: Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (Video Game)
Genre: 26k of andrei trying to get lacroix to live a little, Anal Sex, Drama, Guro, M/M, Minor Character Death, Pre-Canon, Xenophilia, i didnt mean for this to get so edgy sorry, some consensual, some not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:21:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27845188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkinIsCrawling/pseuds/SkinIsCrawling
Summary: Shortly after arriving in Los Angeles, Andrei pays a visit he believes is due.
Relationships: Sebastian LaCroix/Andrei
Kudos: 15





	1. Prelude

**Author's Note:**

> ive been doing this one for just too long. began to feel a bit bloated and rehashy tbh but i dont want to look at it anymore, so im just going to hit post :p

Los Angeles was unlike any place Andrei had known.

The smells were myriad, the sights many. He had hunted this evening within the dense maze of the city's heart to harvest a bountiful glut of unsuspecting blood - and now, the time came to stalk back to the outskirts nestling his makeshift haven. The kine residencies were sparse upon vastly barren concrete roads, the night a calming black save for only the periodic glowing stripes of the streetlights. Yet even as the drone of neoteric towers and rumbles of automobiles faded to the rustle of withering trees, he felt the city's lifeblood run with a quickened pulse all the same. 

Those towers bore the burden of Jyhad, and when those endless lights glared to the streets, they narrowed the dark glades where Cainite might find refuge. Andrei rejected the air's insidious touch, even within this domain buckling beneath its own weight, a lifetime away from quiet spires and easily-cowed peasantry. To proceed with cowardice would have been easy - to proceed with poise and composure was the duty of apex predator.

Deep silence fell as he turned the corner to his lair, save for the hum of gentle wind. The pathways became cracked beneath his feet as the building loomed - a place of worn brick and black iron bars with a single towering chimney, spewing the memories of long-settled kine ash. Even the most senseless mortals avoided the abandoned crematorium, and the shadows seeping forth unsettled the vampiric weaklings well enough. Here, the fledgling Sabbat could snatch the small, secretive shelter it needed. 

Andrei had been only the third flying Sabbat colours to land in Los Angeles. The two preceding Lasombra quarrelled without end over whom would assume the title of Archbishop when the time came, and those that had joined thereafter had swiftly sparred to organise their ranks - but that all mattered little to the Tzimisce. He did not awaken each night with thoughts of title or subordinates, but dreams of eyes and mouths that would soon descend from unholy heavens, and recognition of the fact that taking America's final chokepoint would be instrumental in turning that tide away. To play his part would be an honour.

The trees shivered as he approached the crematorium's arched entryway, carrying the scent of ash that was not old, but burning, choking hot down his gullet. The scorching scent reeked of final death and fresh gunfire, and as he extended his auspex, vision of vitae shaped to biting weaponry prickled harsh over his skin. Beneath it, half-bonds stabbed as they broke away one by one, waterlogged with a slew of spilled blood. 

Andrei rushed the doors in a moment.

The dust-greyed debris of the narrow entry corridor ran scarlet with the remains of blood dolls, slashed with pale streaks of corpse skin and bone. Andrei spotted wide, slitted eyes flashing from a shadow - a figure hunched over, his broad claws arched upon the floor. A Gangrel, nothing more than fellow, familiar Sabbat - it was the sound of rapid, distant footfalls he concerned himself with, and how they grew closer with each passing second.

" _Seal the door,_ " he growled to the Gangrel, and was quickly obeyed. Then, Andrei turned his gaze to the door to the end of the corridor, hanging loosely ajar. Hasty gunshots resounded amongst the skittering amongst the skittering footfalls; the sound of a coward's retreat.

The vampire hurtling himself through the doorway was unfamiliar, a man with sleek clothing that would have been kept pompously well if not for the deep gashes split over his closing wounds and the vitae drying in his hair. He held his firearm close as he lurched terror-blind for the exit - just blind enough for Andrei to take his chance. Acting with a haste that did not leave time enough to even shift his form, Andrei thrust his arm forth to curl his claw to his shoulder, to which the man hissed, thrashed and, in a blinding, white-hot crack of light, shredded the Tzimisce's thigh with a shot of merciless metal. Andrei immediately dulled the bullet's cradle of severed nerves, discarding his own pain and tightening his grip onto the man's sharp shoulder. 

Before he could make his escape, Andrei dragged the man to one of the many cramped alcoves lining the entryway, trapping him into some forgotten coffin-hold with a shoulder slammed to the wall. The moment was rushing by quickly, pushing him to rake his claws with vigour, until the fabric's seams gave way and, finally, Andrei could commune with the man's body. A cursory scour spoke of Toreador blood, as did the specific shine to his darting eyes - soon shut once Andrei bunched his flesh to knots of agony, distracting him beyond struggle.

"Oh, _God_ -" he moaned, "What- what are you-"

"Why?" demanded Andrei. "Why do you come here?"

The Toreador bared his fangs, straining from his claws and heaving laboured breaths in an attempt to speak. He jerked beneath his hold, and with another gunshot breaking _loud_ through stale air, Andrei felt a hot, forceful tear through his stomach - he allowed himself a moment of stifled shock. The man's resilience was greater than he might have expected, to still act with such conviction beneath his fleshwork.

However, no thread of admiration could hold so tightly as the call for retribution. The Tzimisce again muted his own flesh, and dug his fingers instead to the Toreador's.

He erupted his vicissitude in deep, strong bursts, sending its roots to wrap his spine, where he could have his muscles stiff and seizing. The Toreador's face wound despairingly tight, baring that gratifying moment where he realised he could no longer flee - yet true terror needed instilling, as resistance still weighed heavy on his mind. Andrei pushed his firearm from his shaking fingers, first, and dropped it to the floor, before taking one of his softly-skinned hands. The fleshy little things writhed beneath his claws.

He knew it was often the fingers that most strongly affected kine and Cainite alike, and as unrefined a technique it was, now was not a time to tarry. He held the Toreador's hand to his eyeline, ensuring that he would see as he took one finger, and pushed backwards - it was only the physical force, to begin, before the bone and tendon beneath whined its complaint. That was when Andrei worked his craft deeper, to weaken and finally _snap_ , a pathetic little whimper escaping the Toreador's clenched jaw at the sight. The second knuckle was much the same, bent backwards past its limits as the Tzimisce ensured he watched, and understood that this was only the beginning of how the fleshcrafter might defile his body. 

" _Why_?" repeated Andrei.

"The Prince," said the Toreador, speaking as though strangled. "He-" He swallowed, gritting his fangs once more, willing his vitae through his incapacitated body with a shake of his head.

A _Prince_? He worked the tip of his claw beneath the Toreador's nail when his words broke down. He built his pressure slowly, until it set the nail to crack and spread dark, bloody webs where it separated from his finger. " _Continue_ ," urged Andrei. Impatience building, he ignited the sensitive nerves beneath without care, tantalised by the knowledge held just from his reach.

The last true Princehood of Los Angeles had ended decades ago, and though he had heard of some ineffectual attempts to capture the title, he knew of none that had weathered more than some small handful of nights. An unexpected hindrance was an unwelcome as any, but then, the soft and snuffable candleflames of the Camarilla were _nothing_ to the roaring fire of the Sabbat.

Andrei held strong at the Toreador's throat, unsure of just how he would proceed in this interrogation, and how he would make his impression as he delivered him back to this _Prince_ -

A firm thud struck the crematorium, the force of it knocking dust from the ceiling. Whipping his head back to the corridor, Andrei saw the Gangrel hopelessly attempting to gather his body against where the unknowable sought to breach their barriers. With the sound of wreckage kicked aside, another figure emerged from the depths of the ruined building - one of the elder Lasombra, gathering himself and his writhing shadows with a snarl upon his face. Andrei should have been rushing stalwart to the man's side, preparing to demonstrate viciousness incomparable in the name of his Sect and yet - he hesitated. An ominous hang of potent power told him to merely observe, tugging his tenses with a rare, smothering dread. The Toreador's whimpers alone interrupted the stillness in the air, made quiet with a finger wormed beneath his skull.

With a crash, the door splintered from its frame.

The beast he witnessed was terrible, and magnificent - a behemoth stinking of fleshcraft, on such a level that the strength of his very existence seemed to roll in shuddering waves from his body. His power doused the room as a sudden beacon that Andrei could do nothing but marvel at, tasting strange sorcery and only a rudimentary use of auspex, both insignificant afterthoughts to this creature's vicissitude. The red of his eyes narrowed to vivid slits, yet his haggard and bestial face remained devoid of rage or passion as he looked to the Lasombra, uncaring for the Gangrel he had sent sprawling to his feet.

The Lasombra charged with an enraged hiss, whipping the shadows about his hands as he flew frenzied over bone and blood. Yes, the Lasombra's strike would weaken the beast, leading Andrei to meet him in Zulo and topple the thing - but the Lasombra missed his mark, his great, oily tendrils whipping at nothing. In a cloud of bloody mist, the behemoth weaved behind the Lasombra - Andrei hurled his auspex forwards for an urgent warning to his elder, yet the Lasombra had time only to stagger in regretful confusion before the arc of a slablike sword fell, its weight a clear sentence. Even the settled blood of a long-dead elder could spray when his neck was severed so, cleaved aside to part his head from his body with ease.

The hollow, splintering sensation within Andrei's chest could not be alleviated with his own fleshwork, its pain gripping him with more of that hesitancy. The Tzimisce had always understood that it was only the weak who prioritised their own survival on a battlefield, but as he smelled the ash of his allies all about him and saw the ruin their every effort was soon crumbling to, he did not yet launch his assault.

The point of the behemoth's sword scraped loud across the floor as he took his steady, inevitable steps towards where the Gangrel skulked. His long coat was spattered with thick sprays of dark blood, ash stuck thick to his blade, and yet no hint of diablerie upon his lips, nor even any motive free from the drudging shackles of obligation. Andrei saw his fellow Tzimisce, the only one he knew of within this domain and one with such awe-inspiring power, power that could sweep these dirtied shores clean... and he realised he was witnessing that power put to use for the Camarilla. 

The Gangrel lunged to the great Tzimisce with claws brandished, growling to his last. His endeavour was to meet his final death with valiant defiance - one that Andrei would commend, made successful with a swift downwards blow. The Gangrel shuddered, crumpling back to the floor with his spine impaled through, soon settled as dust.

Before him, Andrei watched all become undone, and when the great Tzimisce raised his eyes from the Gangrel's corpse, Andrei knew he could not linger - lest the torch he now bore fall to the same darkness. His vitae boiled as he rendered his flesh malleable, dissolving his form to ephemeral nothingness, before his ashes would be scattered to eternal silence. This was not his night.

The brightness of the beast's eyes pierced the fallen dust and creeping darkness, and for a frozen moment, he wondered if their white pinpoints held his gaze. Andrei knew to vanish before he would have a true answer.

\---

The raw loss was made bearable, in those next few nights, by the twin flames of curiosity and challenge.

It would bear no fruit to dedicate himself to a satisfying vengeance, regardless, as it seemed the forces flocking this _Prince_ would not be struck down so easily. His path lay in putting the death he had witnessed aside and looking instead to the future, and to how it might be pulled to his palm. Thoughts of retaliation were dismissed, leaving only purpose in their place. And as he stood at a battered, broken helm, with numbers not yet beneath his banner, that purpose was an obvious one - to pluck what he could of this nesting Camarilla.

An attempt at contact before the war horns sounded was the first opportunity he chose, unusual and difficult to grasp though it was. Such was what led him to the walkway above the old floorboards and warm lights of a kine stage, confident that these fools would not have senses sharp enough to catch sight of him. If only he might have emerged before all, displayed himself as their lost pinnacle of vampiric existence and proclaimed that he was as _Kindred_ to them as one another, even as they burrowed deeper to their own denial - yet it was not time. Andrei pressed himself to the walls of the wings, the old walkway creaking beneath his solidifying form.

"...and as this domain rises itself from troubled ashes, let there be no assumptions of leniency in our each and every duty. It will be with _accountability_ that our society might flourish, as little pleasure as any of us take in its enforcement."

Finally, past grand curtain and tangled wire, Andrei glimpsed what he could of the Prince. 

The eminence of the Camarilla held his court with words ringing loud and faithless, striding across the kine stage with pride in his every step. Though he hung his figure with heavy blacks and greys that stood stark beneath the soft light, his skin was smooth and with a weakening pallor, his bright hair and pale eyes lacking any true severity to them. Andrei had gathered tortured whimpers and hurried whispers of the man in equal part - he had found someone similar to himself in age, a reckless, uninformed boy to some and a draconian tyrant to others. Thick waves of uncertainty rose throughout the room, washing over the feet of a Prince that surely could not have been ignorant to it. 

The smell of ash and vitae passed him, then, as the Prince strode to no longer block from Andrei's view where blood spilled across the stage. As the ripples of death settled, the Tzimisce realised he had caught the end of an execution - was _this_ what the Camarilla named an iron fist? Some few of the Prince's procession of sundry clans glanced to the remains with some discomfort, save for one familiar figure, slowly hefting his bloody sword to its sheath.

The great Tzimisce stood upon the Camarilla stage with a disciplined stillness to his body and eyes rapt upon his Prince. The source of the odd numbness to his mind was made evident, shown in thoughts occupied with nothing but the Ventrue, bent to a slurred haze of domination and the hold of an entrenched blood bond, leashing the great beast to quiet submission. Andrei was unsure he had ever before seen a sight so grotesque.

"Let this stand as a demonstration that shall not bear repeating," said the Prince, stood over the ashes of a defeated foe. Even as Andrei did not care for the social games that polluted most every Sect, he recognised still the falseness of his wistfulness, the quashed sense of pleasure that came in delivering final death - the Tzimisce watched closely. "Good evening."

The tension of the room crested, but none spoke, for honesty was not what they had been taught. He chanced a subtle survey of the theatre's occupants - the disgusting perversion of familiar blood that could belong to only a Tremere, a barrage of apathy wherever there was not disdain, and an epicentre of hatred brewing from one of the final mewling pups of the Second Revolt, now sat before a Prince with nothing but a scowl. The folly-sect of the Camarilla was spreading quickly, it seemed, regardless of where this one Ventrue was leading it.

Andrei remained still as all began to siphon from the room. The dying murmurs told him that now was the time to seize the Prince, with fewer prying eyes than necessary - the minutes dragged as many of the Camarilla dallied and milled. The Prince himself had drifted to the wings, caught in talk with one of his fellow Ventrue - one with lank inky hair whose eyes were restless, despite his ease of conversation.

"-and, my Prince," caught Andrei, "what he had said concerns me, and how much truth he might have been withholding. I am uncertain of his intentions-"

"Thank you, yes, your words have been heard. If that was all?"

There was hardly a question in his tone. The Ventrue wore a resolute frown as he looked upon his Prince for a long, quiet moment. Then, he nodded respectfully, dipping his face further to darkness.

"It was. Thank you for your time."

LaCroix gave no reply, only an expectant gaze that sent his lesser scattering. " _Sycophante_ ," he muttered to his Sheriff, stood rigidly watchful at his side.

The lights died one by one as they made their departure, giving Andrei his urgently-seized opportunity. After slipping himself downwards to the stage, he followed a careful few paces behind, treading light before they were far behind the curtain.

He stood proud when it came time to greet him, though he spoke with a low, steady voice. It was his time to be seen as a force, but not yet a threat. "Prince," he began.

"Whatever grievances you have," snapped LaCroix immediately, "I am certain your Primogen will be glad to address-"

LaCroix turned to meet him, and faltered in doing so. His eyes became cold with flat shock and his mouth hung for a telling moment as he gazed hungrily over his visage. Beside him, his Sheriff's glare grew more focused, a steely threat left unsaid as he stepped closer to his Prince - the two may prove difficult to separate, noted Andrei, stood unwavering beneath the beast's judgment.

Yet the Sheriff did not strike, he saw - he tilted one shoulder towards him, claw drifting upwards to make his rising defenses known, but with no move yet to rend him in two.

"There is much we must discuss," explained Andrei, "and I do not believe you account for my line in these ways."

The surprise fluttering over the Prince's refined features was covered quickly, his impassive mask erected before a mind racing with opportunity and potential. A rarer reaction, and not one Andrei had expected of a Prince.

"I see," said LaCroix, curtly stowing those thoughts. "I'm sure you shall understand such a situation - but know that I am in actuality no stranger to dealings with your kin, and that my expectations of you as a member of the Camarilla are _no different_. If you will excuse me, I am quite occupied, but I do hope we shall make contact at a later date?"

His optimism could have blinded with its shine. 

"Look upon me," spoke Andrei, flexing the bones of his skull to preen his spines, and watch pretty, pallid grey draw over them once more. "Do you believe I stand here to play at court with you? We stand upon the brink of a maw for which all blood is indiscriminate; I would not waste both of our dying minutes."

LaCroix tilted his head a defensive fraction away, though he kept his gaze lethally steady upon the Tzimisce. His Sheriff took a step forward to slice the space between them, squaring his heavy shoulders - but the Prince raised a quick hand of pale fingers to still his servant.

"Then please, proceed. Tell me what it is that plagues you," offered LaCroix, his voice steady.

"How the Sabbat will choke you." Andrei tucked his claws behind his back and retained a softness to his voice - that floating touch would carry this as far as it would go. "It feasts upon these cities and encircles this fragile domain. Do you consider its presence an inevitability?"

"I... believe if it presents itself as an obstacle, it will be one I am forced to obliterate."

"Yes, and I come to offer time, before you meet that fate."

The Prince's voice because a hurried utterance, eyes narrowing as he furiously attempted to scrutinize the Tzimisce. "Explain yourself this instant."

"I intend to. Elsewhere, perhaps, where there are fewer ears and eyes waiting to trip your every word." 

The Prince neither jumped to his associates' defense, nor did he gladly flee their company. He only watched, caught between the wolf preparing to strike and the deer coiling to bolt.

"I do not even ask we leave this building," amended the Tzimisce. "My position shall be far more precarious than your own. We meet upon your ground, and as your guest, I would ask nothing more from you."

LaCroix had a suspicious purse to his lips, yet still, he did not denounce his very presence. Andrei waited with eager patience as he cast a cautious glance to his Sheriff, who answered him with a short, sharp nod.

"Very well," said LaCroix, almost beneath his breath. "Follow, and I bid you _do me no harm_."

Fingers of somewhat weak-willed domination brushed Andrei's mind, cast aside quickly in his own blood. He followed the Prince's stride as he turned on his heel regardless, shoving both himself and his visitor out of view - well-versed in remaining covert, it seemed. It mattered little. Whether this Prince was duplicitous, craven or simply corrupt, it would suit his purposes well enough.

The back-corridor in which the Prince gave him audience smelled of must, faceless walls beneath the harsh light of a bared lightbulb. The scent was overtaken with the delicate note of LaCroix's body, before all was soon clogged in the rich, drenching scent of his Sheriff. Andrei worked the point of his tongue to the backs of his fangs with a stiff jaw, noting to slake his thirst after he was done here.

"Now," announced LaCroix, once he stood with arms folded before him, "I do not know who you are, only that you have approached myself claiming membership to an organisation whose presence I shall not tolerate. You give me no choice but to demand an explanation for why I should not put the execution stage to use once more, _immediately_."

The streets of Los Angeles required a sharper tongue than brutal honesty would provide, it seemed. Andrei spoke quickly. "You listen already, and thus prove yourself a more reasonable man than I had hoped." The wave of an ego stoked shimmered beautifully, allowing Andrei to proceed. "So I trust you to recognise how in this fleeting window, our pursuits run in parallel."

"What pursuits - _Sabbat_ pursuits , you are referring to?" Scorn dripped from the twist at LaCroix's lip. "I fail to see circumstances beneath which that could be true."

"Then I shall elucidate. This lawless city floats dead upon the shore, and its veins must be made to run anew." Andrei paused, just long enough to hook him with the few indisputable truths they shared. "This is a place where fledgling regimes are gutted with neither honour nor mercy. In addition to paying you the respect of announcing my presence, I offer we divert our attentions elsewhere." 

"Ah, so it's the chance to grow an army you're seeking from me, and to ask I allow lunatics to run my streets." LaCroix drew back, indignant. "Do you take me for a fool?"

Andrei was unsure. Perhaps, or only desperate enough to bear any option worth consideration - yet there was that inquisitive glimmer behind his gaze as he had looked to the Tzimisce, mirrored a hundred years away in the dulled eyes of his behemoth. "No, not through your streets. If you would listen, instead of only talk."

Then, that glimmer ignited to something more compellingly fierce. What potential would this man have, Andrei wondered idly, if he did not lock his fury to nothing more than a disgusted sneer? To see his face contort in rage or agony might have been a pleasant spectacle. 

"I propose our domains remain separate, if only for a time. I nest in the hills of Hollywood, and I acknowledge the domain encircling your tower. For three months, I give my word that the two shall not meet"

"And if I give no such word?"

"Then you shall strike me down, and in the Sabbat's eternal growth, another will rise in my place. Another faceless and nameless to you, who will strive to spill your blood without the grace of a warning."

LaCroix's sneer did not return, choosing instead to peruse what sat before him with genuine, uncertain silence. Andrei gave him his time - this quiet was a glass that his most delicate touch could fracture.

"I cannot even consider those sorts of negotiations," said LaCroix eventually, a stiffness in his voice. "I will repeat, the Sabbat is a presence I shall not tolerate - I know not who you are, but I would expect better than what you claim to represent, even from one speaking in proper sentences." 

Another push of his vitae, and Andrei saw what the Prince believed he understood - bloodsoaked memories of fledgling martyrs and ill-fated pawns, serving their function with savage efficiency. Was the concept of blood, fire and given purpose enough to sour him so? The pietism was nearly so enraging as the _weakness_ the Sect flaunted, and the temptation to lash a harsh truth its way was a strong temptation - however, he reminded himself, satisfaction was not his sole aim. "I, too, would not have expected anything with an ounce of potential to cower beneath the Camarilla."

Andrei hit his mark. He took the stab with a subtle recoil, the Prince's ego searing hot, before it burned down to doubtful embers.

"But I know well bindings sunk too deep for anything more than compromise. Your crowd swarms still beyond these walls, and I can hear their murmurs of one another, and of _you_ \- do you hear none of it?"

"You're a terribly bold creature, aren't you?" 

"Unremarkable for our kind. It is wounding to see how you force yourself to timidity."

Movement rang dull across the hall, creaking planks and barbed voices. The remaining swarm was due to fall on this communion, it seemed, and the Prince turned a fearful head towards where they would soon be intruded.

"This night holds much for the both of us," said Andrei in closing. "If you wish to see this war resumed promptly, I invite you to it. I hope you take pride enough to face me again, regardless of your choice."

"Wait," said LaCroix. "A moment-"

As the footfalls grew crisper and the straggling members of the Camarilla encroached, Andrei knew that that moment was not his to give. The last thing he saw were two pairs of eyes gleaming beneath yellow light - then, he diluted himself to his purest form, blood seeping and soaking through cracks of rotten wood.

A weakened spot revealed itself within the city's toughened hide, and now that he had seen it, he could not resist lancing his claws forth. Fixation overtook his body, led by nothing more than a scent - the scent of a certain blood, one that could crash as a veritable deluge if only shown the ways it might flow. Even as the nights passed fast and cruel, he held the memory of that scent closely, clotting and sticking to his mind as a reminder of the domain he would dismantle, part by bloody part.


	2. The First Month

Within the upper echelons of Venture tower, LaCroix led the private talks of the evening with a measured effort to keep the bite from his tone.

City-haze spilled murky from the window, glinting as soft fire from the polished wood and gold of the office he had begun holding. Before his desk, wrapped within their crisp coats and inscrutable gazes, two younger Ventrue bade their Prince's word in perfect, practised silence.

"I want the area cleared with force, not bloodshed - I entrust you to strike the balance between discretion and efficiency. We shall discuss this no further until you have succeeded."

One of his agents frowned upon him - the one with black hair and a quick gaze, the one who had been making himself known at a great many opportunities. "But-" He began his outburst, before a marked pause. He knew just what he did as the second agent watched him compose himself carefully, as though restraining himself before someone quite unreasonable. "If you would only consider... the Giovanni have long held claims in the territory, had you not heard? They may consider the action offensive. Is offense our aim?"

Yes, and now he painted him as the blindly stumbling Prince, wreaking great swathes of destruction with a heavy, aimless swipes. LaCroix felt his upper lip twitch.

"I am quite aware." He ensured the words were strung calm and even, lest they feed that image. _Weak and cowering_ might have been another angle, almost feeling the tug as he was brought beneath the unsaid code etched into the long-dried walls of his heart. "However, their hold is far from true domain, and I shall neither flee their shadow nor attempt to placate their unseen interests. Proceed as you have been directed." 

Their assent were mere murmurs, quivering the strained air, as LaCroix met the Ventrue's eyes. Just how many domains had this boy seen? He saw himself there for a flitting moment, the stiffness of duty concealing the ambition that kept one going through the ordeal of reporting to Prince after Prince - or perhaps he only believed he saw such a reflection, as it was all that any of them ever were. Their blood ran much the same, after all. 

"That aside," continued LaCroix, "I had thought the area of concern located rather close to your own haven. Is this incorrect?"

It was everything he had been taught against, running contrary to knowledge centuries old and perhaps due to crumble - a brash blow, with the sort of inelegance that would have had lesser Kindred killed. But the implicit threat coaxed such an enticingly genuine horror in his subordinate when he realised precisely how he had caught the Prince's eye, yielding a thrill hard to find in recent nights.

The boy recovered himself forcibly quickly. "Perhaps, - I'm not sure of the exact locations," he attempted pitifully, slinking back to his place. "It was only a thought."

"Indeed. Now _go_."

With humbled nods and a click of his office door, LaCroix was left to only quiet. That was something he was still growing accustomed to about the tower - the uncanny silence, sharpening and hazing his focus in equal parts. He stared at the firmly shut door, unable to entirely dismiss the image of that insolent stare.

One would have thought that to meet the Ventrue of his city would have been a painless enough task, next to holding himself from the snapping jaws of his more blatant enemies. But of course, he was not so young and stupid as to make such easy assumptions. All required his rigorous attention, even the bottom-feeders that, by now, ought have been his to simply _crush_. 

LaCroix slumped minutely within his chair, as he saw the liberation of holding his own domain had faded before even a single year had passed.

Wallowing in melancholy over it was hardly a viable solution, however, when he might instead prepare to _fix this_. Within an hour, he would be meeting whichever Primogen wished to bemoan concerns LaCroix could hardly even recall for their frivolity, and before that, it would be good form to make contact with that Baron - the one sitting content atop Hollywood. _That_ would be another nest of thorns gone as yet untouched, shoved aside for attending the endless stampede of supposed supporters. Ah, for that, and...

Had he merely imagined that monstrous man in the theatre, now some nights ago? His nonsense had taken such an unexpectedly strong hold, like a tough weed - _Sabbat babble_. He supposed that the flocks of lunatics needed some guiding hand with reasoning above that of an animal, and that more reasoned talk was only how they roped their numbers to what could only most charitably be called a cause.

LaCroix tilted his head lazily upwards, towards his Nagloper's sufficiently diligent stare. He cleared his throat, before he would bestow permission for a thorough scouting of Hollywood, and after that-

His own phone halted him.

Not even a minute could be spared, could it? LaCroix wrenched his phone from his pocket, well prepared to tell most anyone that the moment was far from ideal.

 _Greetings, Prince,_ came the voice, the little device raking the deep, somber voice into a sound that scratched and chilled. Beneath the static, however, LaCroix recognised instantly the voice that had been following him.

And what was he to say - was it Cardinal? His knowledge on the structure of these particular savages was superficial at best. He gave a sharp glance about the room, clutching his phone, as though the eyes of his underlings might have lurked still. The last thing that he needed was one of _them_ seeing something they would wholly misunderstand.

Before he might put himself forward, the creature spoke once more.

_You have honoured our agreement. I did not expect it of you._

Just what that was supposed to goad him towards, LaCroix could not say. "You will find presuming my intent to be an unwise decision."

_I see only the actions before me. Ahead of them, our time bleeds from the further decisions we must make - we have need of a discussion, on how to best navigate this path we walk._

"What _path_ \- if you think I am to be swayed to prostration, you would do well to separate hesitance from frailty in your mind. How is it that you are even _contacting_ me-?"

_My nights are as full as yours. This is not how we shall talk. Tomorrow evening marks one month; I bid you meet me and, comprehend what we have left._

A long moment passed, static pricking to LaCroix's ear. One finger reached to thumb over a button - a single stab that would cut the line and end this nonsense, plunge the static to a more palatable silence. His other hand curled to a fist upon his desk. 

"...then _speak_."

\---

LaCroix did not take to the streets without good reason. Los Angeles was as grim as it was a risk to his presence, rife with filth who would not dare show their faces beneath the light of his office. That filth would fanatically dash between grunge-slick alleyways, their limbs rustling rusted drainpipes as they hurried and screeched the sight of the Prince to their fellow gutter-dwellers and maniacally gorged themselves on hatred for their betters. For some endeavours, however, the natural order of delegation would have to be forgotten - and thus onwards he walked, his Sheriff at his heel. 

This corner of the metropolis was at the least more barren than fetid. The dry soils were broken sparsely with the drab and blocky angles of modern architecture, all neatly fenced from the world outside. The houses with golden windows and insultingly easy game were not his destination, however tempting a thought it was, as he instead came to stop before a gate more sinister. Behind thin metal bars stood one abode with windows unlit, climbing black and noiseless against the city glow - a curious choice, though an oddly subdued one at that.

Darkened windows and deathly stillness were only mildly remarkable, but it was the eerie spirit of the building that might have had even the kine pausing. Some tinge of sickness dropped to his gut, hairs bristling over his spine as he thought he felt eyes rolling to him - all things that could not be pinned yet stood as a blaring warning to the wary nonetheless. To speak in more palpable terms, there were the flies, and faint hints of that utterly unmistakable _smell_.

He looked to his Sheriff, and expectantly back to the gate. It would not do to touch it - caution was no trifling matter in this place.

It opened with a loudly protesting groan beneath the Sheriff's claw. A draft scattered dry leaves across the concrete of the entrance, rife with flesh stench all the stronger. LaCroix set his shoulders back, and proceeded.

"Do you sense a trap yet?"

His Sheriff narrowed his eyes upon the house, before giving a slow shake of his head. 

"Keep yourself sharp to it. You would do well to think a moment before you walk me to my final death, yes?"

The Nagloper no longer required much encouragement to follow his words, but a dose more motivation would never go astray. The dread pulling subtly over his face before it was satisfyingly whipped to conviction, as he walked the few inches closer to his Prince he would be allowed without explicit permission.

The Tzimisce had spat that none would know of this, as LaCroix had spat in turn to the Tzimisce - yet for his Sheriff, a conspicuously effortless exception had been made. Some attempt to prove the Sabbat's compliance, perhaps. 

As LaCroix stood before the threshold, the door's thick glass panes warped all within to dark, melting figures... or perhaps, that was precisely what they were. He _could_ order his Sheriff to burst through and wring the Tzimisce's throat - much as it would only sever the hydra's head, it would at least save himself from further entanglement.

The door opened before the decision was his to make.

Now, the fetor hit him with true force, carried on the rushing current of warm, rotting air that had the Ventrue tilting his head away in reflex. It was flesh perverted to wrongness, almost similar to blood so low that his own body would reject it yet with an undercurrent of a venom more wicked. Through that current, the figure at the doorway stood with majesty.

The boldness of his very being had struck LaCroix upon their first meeting, and continued to strike him still. His noble robes of bright scarlet clung to a frame of sweeping spines, his face turned smoothly to the chitinous headdress of his own skull. With no flesh to mask its passage, he could see where the man's bone and scale ran to meld with skin, entwining to line the sharply masculine edges of his jaw and ghoulishly gaunt cheeks, the way it ran outwards from his severe brow. His eyes peered unblinkingly amber from the petrified green-grey of flesh, blotching to purple at his lips where his corpseblood had settled.

"Welcome," said the monster, bringing his hands to fold before his waist. His skin stretched thin over sharp knucklebones and slim claws. "Please, enter."

Not before reminding himself that any display of propriety was an utter falsehood, LaCroix played his part. "My thanks."

The Tzimisce had a certain grace to his gait, noticed LaCroix, carelessly turning his spiked back to himself - and to a potential blow from his Sheriff. It seemed he had a few seconds more to decide between ending this now, and plundering to the depths of folly. LaCroix steeled himself as he stepped forward, restraining his jolt when the door crept shut behind him.

The pretence of the kine house sunk to nothingness further past the doorway. All was swamped with layer upon layer of skin, sagging from the walls and wrinkling to the strewn lumps upon the floor. The instinct to bring a hand to his nose cried with urgency as he watched a mass of bloody fluid vomited to the floor by a thing unknowable - some gurgling mass of vestigial organ, clinging to the cyst-ridden wall. Yellowed sweeps of adjoined spine swept the ceilings, meticulously carved to convoluting arcs and kept taut with pulsing tendons. Neither moonlight nor the night air could permeate the room, leaving it stuffed with miasma.

Nothing more than was expected of a Tzimisce den, thought LaCroix, holding his composure throughout.

After the expected blow of the barbarism, he noticed the civilised touches, sitting at strange odds with the haven in which they lay. Paintings - contemporary, though not in poor taste - depicting partial bodies lurching from the dark, their pales eyes staring down at their guests with uneasy judgement. The whines beneath his feet were thankfully of only wood as, slowly, he followed the fleshcrafter upwards. Before LaCroix sprawled the desecrated remnants of a kitchen, and beside it, a corner of three tightly tucked chairs with a low table. A dark little parlour, casting crooked silhouettes.

The Tzimisce took his seat on what might have once been a perfectly adequate piece of furniture, now trimmed with cartilage and cushioned with scarred, weathered flesh. With soft flourish, he extended his claw to the bloody chair opposite and, much as he recognised the faux-pas, LaCroix stood fast. His Sheriff held his place beside him, the two of them facing the fleshcrafter in his throne.

"This place is quiet tonight, as it has rested now for some nights. Is the same true of your tower?"

Sebastian's brow drew tighter as he faced what could have possibly been _mockery_. "I find the domain one that requires to be brought beneath a firm heel - I cannot speak of your den. Though-" A way from a arduous negotiation glimmer before him, in the unsuspecting little nest the creature had fashioned for himself. "-if quiet is what you wish, I assure you a sufficiently discrete existence is one I am willing to overlook-"

A humourless chuckle sounded against the backdrop of winding flesh, and LaCroix knew he should not have allowed the deep timber of his voice quiet him so easily. "I do not speak of your society laid in turmoil, nor how your lands quake. I speak of the death in the air. It sickens me with more than its stagnation, but in what it _precipitates_." His eyes lit as he spoke, chest puffing with zeal. "Something sweeps these shores."

"Yes, well... I had hoped to discuss more tangible items."

"I know. The tangible and present are easy occupations - I only talk, and offer my hospitality." Once more, the Tzimisce extended his claws to the chair before him. "Please, sit."

He gave a cursory check of his Sheriff, if only for a dash more confidence that no maw was not waiting to snap his legs clean off. He saw that the Nagloper's concentration was indeed acutely focused, absorbed in staring the Tzimisce's way with neither aggression nor a gesture of warning. Satisfied at least for his physical safety, LaCroix acquiesced, looking then to which part of the chair was the least slick with blood or whatever _else_ before tugging his coat beneath him to sit. The lattice of muscle and bone took his weight with a shudder throughout its crude imitation of a body, and perhaps a quiet whimper. 

"I cannot truthfully apologise for how daunting you find my haven."

"My concerns over your presence are based entirely around security," said LaCroix, keeping his voice sharp to veer their talks beneath his own direction. "Personal revulsion is not a relevant factor."

The Tzimisce passed a thoughtful moment, the ribs of his chair spreading wide behind him and his hands resting on gnarled armrests. LaCroix had heard tales of Sabbat Tzimisce before, of how their faces were pleasantly cold next to the burning fury of the Sect's more mindless members - yet even surrounded by his carrion, _could_ this man be Sabbat, sat in such easy dignity and calm?

"I hear your words, and I do not wish to doubt them. However, your _personal revulsion_ runs with all you serve, and it was not engrained with your say... tell me, what is it you feel as you look upon it?"

The Tzimisce leant forward, claws sweeping. The table before them was a low canvas of skin supported by legs just human enough to have their odd angles uncomfortable to look upon. It tremored as the Tzimisce drew a line over its surface, welling with what a kine might have called blood. But LaCroix saw how it did not drip as true blood should have, sitting thick and sluggish within a framework of stretched gristle, swirling to a mangled orb within the centre, all of it joined with dripping, woven cords.

"This cluster of altered nerve," began the Tzimisce, touching at the lump of flesh and running a claw over the pale branches sitting on dark, glittering viscera, "exists in a perfected state of ebbing and flowing agony. This contracts its every muscle until it is rigid, the reflex of fear made innate to its very flesh. It almost feels, as a lobotomite - enough to serve me." 

There was an intrigue to it, perhaps, even through the undoubtable repugnance. Who among them did not feel some passing curiosity as to what power lay in the deepest corners of the vampiric condition? However, he recognised well that only enslavement to one's beast lay in those directions, and that this was not what he was here to reflect upon. He looked back to the Tzimisce with a patiently cocked brow.

"But I distract myself - my point to this is how you cannot stand true vampiric presence. The Camarilla beast distends its stomach on your self-destruction, until it lays beneath its own grotesque bloat, and lends you only the most crippled form of blood."

LaCroix nearly outright scoffed - he was not wanton in his undeath, yes, but he was not so feeble as to be sent fleeing from the profane. But then, his breadth of experience _had_ gifted him a greater tolerance for more unconventional power, next to some of his peers - _they_ would be unable to even detachedly recognise the grotesquerie on display as an exertion of dominion. He shook his head, clearing it somewhat.

"I must reiterate that I fail to see the relevance of this discussion."

"Indeed. In time." The Tzimisce tilted his head upwards, eyes lidded down upon Sebastian. He carried beautifully threatening regality in his crown of bone, that much was undeniable. "You worry for your territory, and with reason. I intend to soon break the blood of vaulderie, and cannot say if it will spill upon your soil. Do you know the practise?"

He was most certainly threatening him now, yes; yet his tone was so unapologetic, his question made so convincingly in the interest of earnest discussion. Those were a rarity indeed.

"The word is familiar in passing, and nothing more. I haven't dabbled with the intimacies of your... customs."

The Tzimisce gave a nod that was understanding, perhaps even kind. A sight chilling in its strangeness alone. "It will have been kept from you. Any way to break the entrenchment of bonds is a sharpened blade against the great beast's veins."

LaCroix did scoff, then. "And so we return to this."

"If you would see past my overstepping - the stubbornness of it fascinates me. You defend your ownership, you wear it proudly. A sight of hideous awe."

"Please, this debate remains a pointless one," Perhaps this had all been a waste, as if that were any kind of surprise. Of course there was no point in engaging with one who thought himself enlightened in his rambles, superstition to be fed to the weak and cultivate cultists-

Was that not the same rhetoric they passed to the kine?

"No," growled the Tzimisce, voice tearing and spines lifting from his shoulders as he became truly enlivened. The walls seemed to bend, the flesh about them contracted with a thousand muffled whines. "It is you who is condemned to exist without meaning, to be _pointless_. You truly say you feel _nothing_? No strings that pull, no blood that binds. I smell someone dead clinging to you, your forefathers or - was it your Sire-"

" _Enough_ ," declared Sebastian. "I had come here with hope of a fair discussion, and now I see my error clearly indeed. If you intend to take advantage of my patience to distract and deceive, I do not have the time to indulge it."

The Tzimisce passion billowed to something different, lowering his head and showing his fangs, a defensive beast. "I do not play at deception," he snarled, "you have my _word_. I know the Camarilla as a lot of blind fools, but this ingratitude, it-"

His claw shot forward, to where his own hands were folded standoffishly in his lap. The Ventrue had time to only gasp. The Tzimisce had the burning eyes of a madman, his bone-hardened claws digging to his flesh with such strength that it served no use to pull himself back.

" _Unhand me_ ," commanded Sebastian. He felt his lip pull from his fangs, the fever of it given him to instinctive fledgling gestures he should have long ago dismissed. Only a fraction of a second must have passed; it was difficult to perceive such things as the Tzimisce kept his grip strong, his glare frothing with furious determination. Beneath that glare, he saw for one bizarre, frenzied second, the faint echo of a plea.

Then, he began to feel his skin sear.

An icy chill gripped his flesh, as though his forearm was submerged in smooth liquid; his Sheriff acted the moment it gripped lower, sending a cold tingle across dancing nerves. Before it could take a true, painful root, the Nagloper stepped swiftly between the two of them, his coat falling as a thick barrier as he wrenched the Tzimisce's hand from him in one forceful jerk. The smaller beast submitted, sent back to his chair with the ragged growl torn deep from the Nagloper's chest.

A reaction just fast enough, but not with his usual immediacy - that the Tzimisce had even laid a finger upon him was something that would need a _thorough_ addressing. LaCroix sat back within his own loathsome chair, fingers grasping searchingly over his wrist. A cool burn whispered within his body, and looking down, he saw it manifest in streaks of discoloured purple. Yet it was _beneath_ his skin where he felt the true change, where something was resting within him, pulsing through stilled blood. It should not have exhilarated him, not in the slightest, yet he felt his debased veins give a thrill he promptly banished from his mind.

When he faced the beast once more, his face was solemn, his eyes heavy. "I apologise," he said with his voice a low and genuinely regretful growl of which some distant part might have rung true. "The work was unintentional. If you wish, I shall reverse it."

"Make no further move - that will not be needed." He winced in reflex from the thought of his hands upon him once more, his skin and flesh. "I shall listen to you one final time - one final time only. This parley hangs by a thread, so why, pray tell, should I not snip it free?"

The Tzimisce nodded, made agreeable beneath this rather credible display of regret. Such terribly nuanced emotions should not have fit upon his features. "The vinculum shall progress. Packs shall swell. I can no longer guarantee all numbers will fall outside of your territory."

"That convinces me of little."

"We have agreed already that Sabbat presence is inevitable, I had thought." The Tzimisce left him an opening to spar and protest, but LaCroix would not be baited. "I am able to offer only this: leave me my haven still, and I will quell attacks directly to your person. The greater spread Camarilla, I cannot speak of, but I will not interpret stray casualties as retaliation from yourself."

LaCroix took a dead lungful of air, warm and necrotic though with the smell faded somewhat. He exhaled it steadily, picturing how these terms might play out, attempting to see the alternatives. In truth, he was in no position to take Hollywood, with his domain much too unstable to yet attempt expansion. Yet, he was not truly considering _allowing_ Sabbat operations downtown, was he? The Tzimisce awaited his words in patient silence, though LaCroix could see the tension in the raised veins of his claws.

"Even if I had reason to give explicit permission for such things, you know I would be unable to." 

"Yes, I shall take it implicitly. Formal declarations do not interest me." 

To reject the Tzimisce would mean outright war at last, which would have with no doubt been the simpler option. A twitch of his fingers, and LaCroix could have his Sheriff impale him upon his own suffering table. Still, the thought _tired_ him, knowing all too well that he had enough wars internal and external to attend as it were... LaCroix's shoulders fell as he knew just how tempted he was.

Yet there was hardly any point to being Prince, if he could not answer temptations no other would understand.

"If this were to be the case," he began, keeping his voice heavy and unwavering, "then I cannot afford any unclear boundaries. A single direct attack upon myself or my Council, and rest assured, your final death shall be swift. Stray incidents if indeed made _discrete_ , after any direct perpetrators answering to Camarilla justice... might be dealt with on a case-by-case basis."

The Tzimisce didn't smile, precisely. His features relaxed somewhat, his eyes wrinkling with warmth and a contemplative tilt of his head, as though judging him worthy of consideration. The thought shocked wrongly to LaCroix's core.

"There is some reason to be found among you. This satisfies me, and I have no more to ask of you - unless you wish to continue our discussion."

"I... don't think that necessary." He was unsure why the words had stuck on his tongue. With even _vicissitude_ rubbing cold against his veins, with the trickle of fluids down walls of skin meeting his ears, he acknowledged that his intrigue may have utterly skewed his better judgement. But then, reaching for resources that others might tremble to consider was hardly a flaw - he stood, as the Tzimisce did the same.

He was guiding him to the door, LaCroix realised, as if he had not made a casual offer at war. Bemused, he followed, his Sheriff following closely by his side.

"Suspected Sabbat members shall be disposed of immediately if found within close range of Venture Tower," clarified LaCroix as he made his way from the haven of flesh. He was watched still by those vast paintings and the eyes of creatures wallowing in half-sentience. "Any prolonged interest in the area shall be interpreted as worthy of investigation." Some bizarre, regret panged that he could not simply allow the Sabbat to flourish, send their rabid troops to purge the streets anew. One _terribly regretful_ incident and Rodriguez could be the one lining these walls, or perhaps that one particular Primogen would never complain of him again. Ridiculous and irresponsible fancies. 

"A fair bargain," said the Tzimisce. "I shall keep our machinations as separate as is possible - as these two more months remain."

"Of course," said LaCroix, stopping before the door. He did not know if those two months seemed a moment or an eternity, before there were no more decisions to be made and that _path_ between them wound no longer.

In a surfacing breeze of cool, clean air, the Tzimisce opened the door with yet more flourishing propriety. The door gaped a deep blue, and the night stretched endless from the haven of smothering scarlet and choked warmth.

"Farewell, Prince. To another fruitful month."

"...quite," he settled on, unsure if he was allowed to agree.

As he stepped forward, however, he noted the immediate absence of heavy footfalls, the falling sense of sudden vulnerability. When he turned his head to where bright and bloody light streamed forth, he saw his Sheriff daring to _hesitate_. The way that he was staring to himself, as though looking right through him, was something he had not witnessed in years - LaCroix had wondered whether exposing him to such rampant fleshwork would be a mistake, whether ideas would begin to worm about the sorts of things that the Ventrue would _not_ tolerate within their haven.

LaCroix cleared his throat "Well?" he asked, ensuring to press his voice with just the balance of disappointment and anger that would send the message clearly. Assuredly dulled behind the eyes, the Nagloper stepped from the threshold, brought to heel once more. 

The night before him would be busy even as its hours dwindled, all streaming past him like the quick city lights - the lights of where place to which he needed to return himself, and soon. Even after the doorway shut behind him and the fire-amber pouring from the den was snuffed, LaCroix was sure that he felt the Tzimisce's eyes upon him still, waiting and watching.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i went back to andrei's house after writing this, and he actually only has one bone chair, not several in the location specified. i would like to formally apologise for inaccurate chair lore
> 
> or maybe his chairs died, or smth


	3. The Second Month

It was a scent that Andrei had followed to the streets of Hollywood, a scent that he had come to know intimately well carried on battering winds. Distant lightning lit the horizon to purple and red shades of ruddy decomposition - but the storm was not here. Not tonight.

He no longer needed to personally oversee every twitch of the city's restless writhing, now that his forces had grown past the strays and the brutes to more discerning members of the undead, all serving the will of the Sabbat. However, it was an urge bordering upon _individualistic_ that sent him to oversee the alleyways - much as it all fell within perspective of his Sect, it felt only fitting to lend his own hand to it. 

The roily clouds blanketed a darkness that even the city lights fought to truly dispel, making an easy task of lurking unnoticed. He hovered closely along the walls of one particular building - a jewellery shop - at the head of the alleyway in which he waited, cluttered enough to keep him from sight. None would look here from the street painful in all its light and colour, anyway, not to the quagmires of the back-streets. Down the darker route running directly across from the building, two dirty dead kine slumped against cold walls - a token of goodwill, before complaints would be made of this _masquerade_. With the witnesses to his presence silenced, Andrei closed his eyes, and sought instead what lay within.

In soft pulses, hints of the room's outline came to him, peeked through three different sets of eyes - but he caught enough. Visions of unneeded light and the baubles of the living, with a deafness to one's own heritage that only a Toreador would be capable of. Two shadows blotted the intricate floor patterns, one small and one large, stretching dark against a backdrop of terse, hurried words.

"These terms would be more than fair-"

"LaCroix," came another firm voice - Andrei felt the Prince's outrage so strongly that the tension thrummed through his own jaw, twisted beneath the urge to lash back. "With all due respect, you won't find what you're looking for here. You're welcome in my domain as a visitor - nothing more."

LaCroix's sharp sigh was poorly concealed. "I see," he said, eventually. "I do understand how quickly all is progressing - I shall contact you at a more convenient date, after you have had the time to... reflect upon what shall serve your territory best." 

The Baron gave his own sigh much more brazenly. "You do just that. Now, please, we are both busy men..."

At the rustle of movement and the sound of false pleasantries, Andrei withdrew, forcing himself back to the dank air. He had wondered of whether their pre-emptive truce would see its end this night, whether war was the reason for his passing - but as he touched the Prince's mind boiling with nothing but frustration, he doubted that his business lay outside of the Baron. He might depart, now, and attend the ever-hungry domain; yet he instead wiled a few seconds more beyond sight, hopeful that within a dark nook and behind the busy vampiric hub of Hollywood, his presence would go unnoticed. Even as forcing himself unseen was usually a distasteful notion to the Tzimisce, Andrei found himself gripped with the urge to observe.

The Prince and his Sheriff emerged with light shining bright over the murky puddles of the alleyway for a quick moment, extinguished swiftly as LaCroix shut the door of the jewellery shop behind him.

Just how the Ventrue found himself unwelcome was obvious in his inwardly-drawn stance, the hunched defence of a man who considered himself loftier than the backalleys reduced to them nonetheless. Yet his very form did not fit, either - the pearl shine of his skin against roughly hewn brick and concrete, the glint of bright hair that could so easily become sullied. The sight of his body set a devouring reminder of riding his beast for that one feverish second, of how he had shot forward to the Prince's flesh and buried himself to his arm. His skin had parted with supple ease, he had _welcomed_ him, his composition stronger than frayable kine but with a fineness of breeding that leant itself to a tender malleability. He would flay like silk, and in that fact lay a maddening distraction.

The dim sensations brushed at his body and stung crisp over his wrist, over where his own touch still drifted within the Ventrue's veins. He had not had his Sheriff pull Andrei's trace from his flesh, the Tzimisce noted.

"Are those corpses?" hissed LaCroix, halting abruptly. His voice was low, as if the greatest secret this city could hold was a dead vagrant or three. "Those were not there when we entered, correct?"

His Sheriff raised his head, shallow ripples of auspex disturbing his own. Andrei readied himself to announce his presence, before he felt something _else_ ; an abrupt, snapping tension through his skull, one that surged with a fixatedly violent intent.

"What is it?" demanded LaCroix, as his Sheriff looked past the jewellery shop, out past the bustle of the boulevard. It was there, some distance away - a shade laying in wait, positioning himself deliberately between the golden rays of the streetlights. Within the alleyway, the Sheriff stepped forward to greet the threat, but a wary voice held him back. "Wait," said LaCroix. " _Follow_."

Whomever this sudden, furtive adversary was, Andrei could taste his blood trace of middling potency, one that the great Tzimisce could have struck down as effortlessly as he had slain Andrei's own brethren. He saw him desire it for a frozen moment, grand claws curling with the instinct to stalk, hunt and mangle - all snipped to numbness, as the Prince turned a sharp heel and led the two away from the noise of the main street.

Andrei witnessed the Camarilla meeting their foes with curiosity and disgust intertwined. Their very Prince scurried to the shadows, calculating an alternate route of escape from the dimmest gleam of fang.

LaCroix did not go unnoticed. Their stalker turned to a pursuer, crossing the streets with a bold, purposeful tread and passing Andrei's nook by as he lost himself in a singular purpose. The faint air of alcohol sat along his savourless blood, kine scents clinging to crumpled clothing that would catch no particular attention from a crowd - no fledgling, Andrei saw, but certainly no elder.

And _yes_ , thought the Tzimisce with glee, the Prince was cornered - forced to choose between ceasing this stubborn denial of his nature and meeting his final death within the back street. Though his time here had passed, Andrei emerged some few inches to peer down the alleyway, and watch whatever spectacle might unfold.

The way was narrow, crowding the Prince and his Sheriff cautiously close. Its walls were lined with scratched doorways to quiet places, and above, skeletal metal pipework sliced the thin slit of sky left unblocked by brickwork glistening in its own filth. The Camarilla's huntsman stood at the head of the alleyway to trap his prey, Andrei waiting behind him a tentative distance from plain sight. 

LaCroix faced the man with composure, bringing his fingers to steeple thoughtfully before his waist. He stood in tired judgement, shoulders shifting with a steadying sigh, before he opened his mouth to speak.

Whatever words he might have fought with were soon put to silence. A sudden hint of yet another undead presence bubbled in the air, swelling out of sight for a bare second, then cascading forth from an alley doorway with a resounding crash. With snapping fangs and slashing half-claws, a tall, broad vampire emerged to lunge for his prey, grasping for the Prince's shirt and snarling to his face. The Ventrue recoiled with offense rather than distress, huddling closer to his Tzimisce companion and answering with own subdued hiss - so his reflexes still had some point to them, it seemed.

LaCroix's Sheriff swiped for their closer attacker, claws easily encircling his throat to pry him from his Prince. _This_ , Andrei watched keenly. The beast lifted him with one mighty arm, ignoring how his legs kicked and flailed as he merely watched, impassive. Frantic gunshots shattered the air, sparking in quick succession from their initial pursuer. The great Tzimisce only gave the softest of twitches, even as metal bored hot to his flesh and his blood burbled from the quickly-closing holes. His _blood_ \- its smell inundated his senses, even with the street between them. From a teasing undercurrent, the scent grew to a burning temptation, running fresh over the great Tzimisce's skin. 

Even bathed in the engrossing smell of his vitae, Andrei still caught the distinct tone of his vicissitude. It had a rugged edge to it, something jagged and vicious that cracked a body as a hammer through ice, rather than redirecting the flow of flesh made liquid. Enraptured, Andrei thoughtlessly delved his auspex deeper until he felt the pressure of claws about a throat, choking and squeezing, with a touch of fleshcraft to fracture skin of vampiric mettle. The broad man - now a little thing by comparison - struggled to no avail, fingers scoring at the claw beginning to strip the flesh from his neck. With each squeeze, each touch of power pulsing with the rhythm of a beating heart, his ligature turned to weak, useless ribbons, skin peeling back and falling over the Tzimisce's claws. An emptied firearm gave a hollow click, over the sound of a body forced to ruin.

Time no longer marched when Andrei heard that the deep, wet slash of muscle releasing its hold over bone. The younger vampire's spine disconnected from his body, pulling from the gaping stump of his neck with an obscene sound, pungently cloying strings of fluid hanging between the crumpled body and its detached spinal column. Yet more vitae gushed to his nose, soon overtaken by the dryness of burning ash.

The great Tzimisce did not have even the time to cherish the scent as his second assailant charged him, fumbling to release more fruitless fire. He risked three shots before a bloody claw raised and shoved the wind itself aside with an implacable power - one more ethereal than fleshbound. Its effects were no less definite, stabbing and warping the man, wringing forth a tortured scream. He clutched at his head and his chest, bent double and rent by formidable forces, managing to only choke a few terrified droplets of blood to the floor and falling, joining his associate as damp dust. 

In the ecstasy of it all, Andrei saw his curtain had slipped. Lowering his claw, LaCroix's Sheriff met his eyes with no uncertainty - but he did not resume his warlike stance, and instead only looked to the Tzimisce with meaningful eyes, so charitable as to share this irreplaceable sensation of a lesser slain. 

It lasted barely a second, soon interrupted by a pale hand grabbing firmly at the great Tzimisce's arm. The Prince pulled his Sheriff from the alleyway, the beast's astounding strength swiftly broken beneath the Ventrue's small, weak fingers. He dragged him through the door from which their attackers had emerged, slamming it firmly shut behind them.

Andrei passed a peaceful moment, stood amongst ash and corpses, in a now lonely alleyway. An unknown pull drew him forth, over the defeated and to gaze a long, quiet moment at the door behind which the Camarilla's greatest had hidden themselves.

He was ascribing meaning to this, he realised, he felt some investment to the mundane disputes of unlife - and that such a feeling was riveting. Though he had heard the slide of a lock turned, Andrei could not be kept from chasing this - he faded his form, limbs and organs unravelling with haste, until he could seep beneath. 

\---

"You could have used your _sword_ , at the least. The nights of simply butchering witnesses are long passed, how many times must I say it? The kine have their eyes everywhere - do you even think of how such a display _looks_ , indisputably etched on tape-"

Sound returned to Andrei first, in the form of the Prince's staccato spitting, set to a backdrop of pacing steps. His words wavered as Andrei rose, refining his vitae to hardened bone and scale.

Once his eyes had sufficiently congealed, Andrei saw what must have been kine storage, at some forgotten point - a cramped room, filled with failing old shelves home to cobwebs, mould and darkness. Through that darkness, the Sheriff rose as a fearsome bulwark to the Prince, peering almost from behind his coat with a remarkably spiteful fear.

" _You_ ," he began, nose wrinkling. "What is the meaning of this? I overstep no accord - call your hounds from me this instant!"

"It is not my forces hunting your head, this night." Andrei shifted the ridge of one brow - a finger pointing his way was expected. For the Prince to attempt negotiations despite it was not. 

"Yes, yes, and you just so happen to pass through here?"

"You ride close to my territory. I had been following you."

"Ah." There might have been relief flickering over the Prince's face, soon drawn to the necessary scepticism. He ceased skulking behind his larger companion, however, stepping forth to meet Andrei on more equal footing. "You might have announced as such, you are aware?"

"I am aware. I did not." The Ventrue did not balk as Andrei approached, now that his thrall had cleared aside. "Yet I ask still that you sate my curiosity - is this night of yours set aside solely for Camarilla negotiations?"

"Anarch negotiations, if you must know."

" _Anarchs_ \- no such thing, only the shards of your fractured Sect. A fractured Sect sent cowering from dead whelps. Without dignity, isn't it?"

Andrei had found himself oddly preoccupied by the way LaCroix's eyes sparked when challenged and teased, the way that his mouth drew to a pout before he would calm himself for his retaliation. Beneath the solitary, expiring lightbulb, those eyes lit ghoulish silver from shadows carving his sockets sunken and cheekbones gaunt, his inner nature for once proudly obvious to see.

"I'd rather escape undue attention; sacrifices must be made. The two of us had been just engaged in a discussion regarding such things, in fact, one that I cannot imagine you would wish to hear." Andrei allowed himself a tug at his lip. "I don't fear those men, if that's what you're insinuating - I've triumphed over attacks far more formidable in my time." LaCroix raised his chin and allowed pride to tinge his voice, like a growing beast displaying its first kill. "It's the whispers surrounding their deaths one must take heed to."

"I understand your actions well, do not mistake me, and I believe them misguided still." Andrei paused, stopping as he felt it. It was a bristling presence nearby, wreaked with nauseous unease. A place lay trapped in racing thoughts of uncertainty, regret and plans hastily made - and that place was not far from the three of them.

"Mm, but we have talked more than enough of-"

Andrei raised his claw, looking intently across the room.

"Wait. Quiet yourself."

A doorway gaped in open invitation, leading to steps and a space that Andrei could only nebulously sense. Glimpses of decrepit corridors and tarnished stairwells, plunging deeper downwards to the bowels of the building and... yes. _There_ he was.

When he returned his gaze outwards, back to LaCroix, he found a stare of copious offense. " _Quiet myself?_ "

"There is one more."

The Ventrue frowned, following Andrei's gaze past the dirtied door. The sight elicited an adjustment to his lapels, a discomforted shift and a soured face. Even in close quarters, the fussy Camarilla creature's display didn't grate so much as Andrei recalled. "You refer to one more of..."

"Your assailants. The final one had fled, and has trapped himself below."

"I... see." His tone was more weary than wary, the distrust that was currency to this man easing its grip. "And you are quite certain this is not your lure to some ambush?"

"I am." Andrei attempted to pin clearer aspects of the man, but he was much too far and fleeting to be of use. Then, he looked back to his company - the half-intrigued Ventrue and the great Tzimisce in all his mighty stoicism. "I see we have once more crossed a path of mutual gain, in how we shall fell this stray."

"We shall?" LaCroix's laugh was a quick, biting little sound. "This isn't worth my time."

"Even after attempting upon you - I had not thought your pride so fickle."

To press him correctly had become an easy task indeed; LaCroix's mouth pulled thinner, his focus flickering back to the doorway. "A petty attack in disputed territory isn't remarkable. Whether a disgruntled independent or a trail leading Abraams' way, I can't foresee myself in a position to accuse anyone anytime soon. I've more important matters to attend."

Andrei stepped forward once more, close enough that he could smell the regret beneath the elegant note of Ventrue vitae. The nights were passing much too fast to spend so long on every single fallen Cainite, he knew - but to see LaCroix deny himself his vital right of blood and justice was a sore cruelty. "You truly have no want to end this? I desire to know more of this Baron, and the same chance lies before you. It is a strange thing to allow to pass by."

"Are you suggesting I destroy this fledgling fool myself? I've other hands for that."

"And I, too," reminded Andrei. "But it is an impossibility to me that you would will to never smell the ash of your foes. I see that this is where they spread weakness within you - do you even truly feed?"

He saw a brow tilted for a wistful second, and knew it was a wistfulness born of want. "You've made whatever point you're attempting to sway me towards, and I..." His voice trailed to a quiet clear of his throat. "You say he is nearby?"

"A mere empty room away."

LaCroix looked to his Sheriff, met with a slow and silent nod. Andrei alone would have been able to feel how his thoughts were alive and crackling with the prospect of a true hunt, stoked with a hopeful gratitude that his Prince would allow it. Ah, how the sorry beast hungered - Andrei smelled his prior kills, the power of his vicissitude, and a spatter of his blood where it dried over his mighty body.

The sheer weight of repression between the two of them was disgusting.

"Perhaps ending this farce now is the correct course of action," conceded LaCroix.

"Then continue," pressed Andrei. "I shall lead you his way, if you only allow it."

"Would you even hear it, if I said I allow nothing?" muttered LaCroix. Andrei did not answer.

Behind the door, the stairwell spiralled to a grey gloom - the kind that clung not in the sweeping veil of night, but in mildew up streaked walls, strangling the light to barely glint from the metal steps and rails. The traces of the other vampire blistered loud and brilliant, the only thing that had roused this place from its slumber in years; a fair outpost, noted Andrei, for when the time came to truly subjugate Hollywood. He had halfway expected the Prince to simply send his Sheriff to the pit, but LaCroix seemed all too resolved to step forth now that Andrei had presented him a frontier to challenge. He could not quiet his disgusted huff at the stagnant smell, however, much the same as he had within Andrei's own haven.

"You," he commanded his Sheriff. "Proceed first." The Prince was to be obeyed, naturally, the frail stairway groaning beneath his Sheriff's feet as he assumed their formation. LaCroix had placed the beast before himself, too - Andrei overlooked any insult to his power, and merely observed the gesture.

Their descent was a slow and steady one, Andrei preoccupied with keeping himself attuned to their prey. Though he reached for the specifics of the power housed within his blood, the man's frenetic state made close observation an impossibility. He would know before the night was through, at the least.

LaCroix, however, was all too discontent with the silence. "I do hope you'll inform me if this greatly furthers Sabbat goals, yes?"

"Our goals align often. Perhaps it is a symptom of something more unusual that bears reflection."

LaCroix gave a flat hum. "Oh, trust that I have no shortage of reflection."

"Truly?" Andrei quickly diverted his auspex from his quarry, rushing instead to the now-familiar feeling of the Ventrue. Spikes of realisation, fatigue and regret washed him, left in the wake of frank words.

"Of course," said LaCroix, correcting his mistake to intention. "You do not believe I dismiss all I find inconvenient, do you? Your ideas are... interesting, shall we say, even if utterly irrelevant to the modern era."

"The final nights has need of them more than ever."

"The final-?" LaCroix huffed another dismissive sigh. He stopped momentarily at where one of the steps had fallen away completely, gingerly navigating his way. As Andrei stepped forth in turn, he heard the rats flee from his footfall. "One matter has intrigued me, on the topic."

"Please, speak. I will share all you will take."

"You seem an intelligent man, and lucid in our dealings - eccentricities aside, that is. How was it that you... fell to this?"

Andrei saw clouded visions before him. Nothing more than the paling image of hot blood on cold stone, a twisting attempt to comprehend the world before him, and weak arms that shook with the effort of momentous toil. His body still recalled, distant though it was, a pain that only death would mend. 

"I _rose_ to this," replied Andrei, "from a lifetime spent clawing my way. If you had done the same, you too would wear your embrace with pride."

"Ah, an inborn cultist. That explains much."

"I was inborn to a chance at an untethered existence, for which my gratitude is eternal." Andrei had taken on a cooler tone than he had intended, voice catching with his low growl. He exhaled. "To speak of those husks we once inhabited is meaningless; the future is the only domain with true importance. My memories depart me."

LaCroix stiffened, turning his head. His eyes pierced pale through the murk. "In what way - do you share it, too?"

"Elaborate."

"My memories, of late - I see them as though through a dirtied lens, kine and fledgling moments bleeding and dulled. A portent of weakness, of decay-"

"A portent of metamorphosis. Neither common nor rare, the shedding of humanity - is it not spoken of in your society?" LaCroix shook his head with remarkable earnestness. "Yes, I share this."

"Yet I am not as you." Doubt wreaked his voice, doubt and a concern that Andrei attended, stepping closer to the stilled Prince. A want to touch him again flared with his scent, to run claws over smooth flesh, subdue his fear and welcome him to his fate - that desire burned with a fervour that Andrei knew, but an intimacy that he did not.

"You are not so blessed in the flesh, perhaps, but we are all instruments of change regardless, our vitae ushering a new age for all. _This_ is why I do not understand how you bear to serve the dead, the dead and the creatures swollen with the power of their dead empires - do you believe they care for your existence?"

For a shortly-lived second that thrilled Andrei deeply, LaCroix hesitated in his answer. "I-"

With a loud snap of electricity, the flickering lightbulb perished, plunging them to darkness.

It was a relief to Andrei, in truth, as his eyes had long been honed to dimness. From their glow, he assumed that the same was true of the great Tzimisce, now looking over his shoulder dutifully in wait of his Prince's word. LaCroix looked about himself in discomfort, glaring through the gloom.

"Our prey awaits." Andrei took a step before the Prince, silently offering to guide him forth. He would have pulled him to it, had it not been for the suspicion that he would not wish his hands upon his skin once more - but then, there were ways he might touch him beyond the flesh. "Do you feel his presence? His dread is calling to us." Andrei pushed his auspex outwards with the beautiful anticipation, allowing the Prince even a taste of how it sung through the air.

"Yes," breathed LaCroix, setting his shoulders back. "Let us continue."

At the base of the stairwell stood a single door - grey metal blooming red with rust, and behind it, the muffled sound of chatter edging to hysterics. The Sheriff stood meekly from it, allowing his Prince the decision.

LaCroix tried the door - sullying his own hand, no less - to yield only a stubborn rattle. The voice on the other side fell to dreaded quiet, each of them wordless as the Prince stood aside and gave his Sheriff a significant glance.

The door burst from its hinges with a single slam of a mighty shoulder and the shrieking of reluctant metal, scraping loudly to its stop flat upon the floor. Andrei wondered if the great Tzimisce had felt bloodlust rousing within his body when he had smashed the door of the crematorium to ruin, if he had hungered in much the same way - to contemplate was useless, however, as Andrei chose instead to simply bear witness to his power.

To call it a fight would have been a kindness. Their target stood within the room long-emptied, with nothing to impede the behemoth's warpath - The Sheriff hurled himself to him in a cloud of vaporous vitae, claw shooting forth to encompass his ribcage and slam him to the wall, the heavy smack of his spine soon followed by his skull. The bright little screen of the device he had been talking into fell to the floor in his shock, yet soon, the man _fought_. The powerful fist he brought back slapped with little impact against the Sheriff's face, his prying at the great Tzimisce's claws entirely futile.

"Do not destroy him," said LaCroix, voice clear and loud as he walked with purpose into the room. His confidence suddenly flowed, as he seized his opportunity and rode it. 

As with the other assailants, he could not name his exact years - only that he was not a fledgling, though still the youngest of the room. He had much in common with the other dead men, in fact, with unremarkable clothing dirtied on his lumbering frame, his hair unkempt and grease-matted but with the carelessness of old filth rather than a great many recent battles. Andrei would assume some band of nomadic mercenaries - mere soldiers, with the least purpose of them all.

"In whose name do you act?" demanded LaCroix. His disciplines flooded the room, his vitae given its will at last.

The Sheriff relaxed the crushing grip on his chest until the man was gulping down unnecessary breaths through his bared fangs. The lowly creature must have mingled often with kine, that such things were still so reflexively strong. 

"I'm... not telling you _shit_ ," he forced out, his eyes lighting as he toed the border of frenzy. One hand whipped out, growing to long, ungainly claws that slashed determinedly for the Prince - but LaCroix stepped back primly, his only wound a lip tugged in disdain. 

It was the moment for Andrei to intervene. "Allow me."

The man's eyes fell to him, growing wild with his mounting terror, his clawing attempts at escape more frantic. LaCroix hovered, eyes narrowed, before stepping back to allow Andrei access at last. The behemoth gave him his way with eagerness, too - he wrenched the stray's arms instead behind his back, exposing his torso to the descending Tzimisce.

Andrei reached with a searching claw, touching to the swiftly-bobbing point of his stubbled throat. His flesh was neither supple nor tough, of a merely adequate quality.

"What the fuck are you-"

"Be still, and quiet," instructed Andrei with a scalding, clogging prick to his neck, disturbing his efforts at resistance. He trailed his claws lower, to the stiff, worn fabric of his shirt, easily torn aside. Before him, sallow skin stretched over faint shadows of ribs, scant hair and flesh hanging loose in the paunch of his stomach, a thoroughly imperfected physique. What lay beneath would entice far more, he was certain. "To scour is a task much more effortless," explained Andrei - as if to the man beneath his claws, or to LaCroix, though with a quick glance upwards for whom else might be listening - "when already in communion with flesh most guarded."

Andrei watched his face closely when he first split his skin, saw the grimace of his locked jaw and noted that it was _fury_ behind this one's eyes. Vitae oozed with vigorous brightness from the crack to his shell, seeping from the long twines of muscle that pulled his chest to its quick heaving. It was all brushed aside, parted to pale creases framing his sternum. His fingers plucked those tightly-wound strings, severing his natural structure to allow the Tzimisce entrance until the smell of vitae ran strong and spattered loudly to the floor.

His moans were fewer than Andrei had expected - perhaps his expectations had sunk after working with the _truly_ weak, the ones who would lament their fate for nights on end. This vampire kept himself adamantly still save for the occasional twitch, even as his fight sapped from his body until the behemoth Tzimisce's claws upon his arms served as meathooks rather than restraints. Upon reaching his ribcage, Andrei did not take the time to lovingly reshape his bone, as he would not need to truly function - he simply held his ribs and pulled, until they cracked to allow him access. _Now_ came the true cry of pain, the man's head lolling back and eyes rolling - but it rattled soon to nothing, his lungs giving an empty, sputtering sort of sound before the silence.

LaCroix waited, watching still with a knuckle pressed closely to his mouth. His Sheriff's eyes watched too, captivated as Andrei pushed lower, bloodying his sleeve when he worked to a smooth cavern slippery with vitae so very near his heart. Andrei nestled himself there, flexing his fingers to trace lines over his inner walls, penetrating through for an exhilarating sensation. The vampire beneath him was only spasming, now, mouth hanging as he looked upon the Tzimisce's wrist plunged to his chest. Their eyes met, and Andrei knew it was time to push his auspex as last.

Though this place allowed him to delve to every corner of the soul, they still only floated as fragments painted in broad, abstract strokes. Working his vitae deeper, the man's body hummed beneath his fingertips until he could nearly hear his voice in his skull. He peered to LaCroix, staring still at the hole Andrei had carved with eyes unblinking.

"I smell little of the baron," he informed him - and much as it rendered the gains of the night negligible for himself, Andrei did not feel regret for this point in time to exist. He closed his eyes as a stray thought drifted as a shiver through the man's body, attempting to force it to the man's lucid forefront. "What I smell upon him is... Ventrue blood."

LaCroix's nostrils flared, fist tightening against his lips before he spoke.

"You must understand I cannot take your word on that."

"You can take and give only certain words, I know," said Andrei, toying still with the fibres of the man's very being in the vain hope that he would yield more. "You have no voice, no acknowledgement and no satisfaction. Pitiful."

"It is," said LaCroix, unanticipatedly quickly. His voice had a catch as he stared over rivulets of draining blood, eyes flickering to the pained regret upon his hunter's face. His hunger stirred, his beast lazily rousing. "Of course satisfaction is not mine to grasp, and so... show me. Grant me it to behold, at the very least."

A joy rose with an unexpected strength that LaCroix recognised this for what it was, that he could _see_ the beauty before them. The two pairs of eyes upon him required his demonstration, his _guidance_ , and Andrei would ardently provide. He curled his hand within the vampire's chest, and wrenched outwards.

To pull a heart free without inflicting final death was no easy task, involving swift and complex fleshwork, but Andrei believed his audience was owed the sight of it. It separated with a jerking undulation of the man's chest, his legs finally giving out as his muscles no longer comprehended the trials his body endured. With his relative youth, his heart was still somewhat close to that of a kine's, connected to its sopping framework and swollen with a bulging, brilliant shine. He did not check as to whether it was revulsion or awe that had LaCroix still silent, though he believed he would be pleased with the answer - the drive of freely spilling vitae was much too distracting to examine it. The pleasure of this pursuit lay before him, Andrei leaning forwards to touch his mouth to lush flesh, and greet it.

His blood was of only fair potence, much as his flesh. Andrei drank of it quickly, grinding the other vampire down to nothing, slicing his fangs through the tough muscle of his heart, and taking generous mouthfuls of his very soul. He gave nothing more than intermittent, lethargic convulsions, his mind fogging to a faint, confused protest, but the Tzimisce was well-practised from vampires of much greater might. Andrei finished him with brutality swiftly delivered, leaving him at the precise moment his body could no longer sustain its form. 

He drew himself from the destroyed creature, the zest of his blood where it coated his tongue all that remained of his person. Coldness brushed up his heart, spreading lively through his veins, leaving bliss in its path. He looked up to the behemoth, to see eyes scorching from his unmoved face, and then to the Ventrue.

He had watched with a gentle frown and softly parted lips, as though he were attempting to understand.

"I know how you are made to revile this," excused Andrei. "Is what lies before you the greatest blasphemy of our existence?"

Andrei knew that he was pulling the answers he wished from him, now, only wanting him to say the thoughts churning so blatantly in his mind. He saw it in how he had stood closer, leaning to him with the wideset stance of a man preparing to strike as his attraction swirled headily - to not only the spilling of blood. The Tzimisce had passed quickly over this before, over what precise interest LaCroix might be capable of holding in amongst their remnants of kine instinct, and found a suitability he rarely encountered amongst the whittled-down number of the dead. Such was unworthy of note. The worthiness lay in how it bloomed unfettered here, amongst cleaved skin, blood and death - he had underestimated the Ventrue's boldness, it seemed, as he did not reject that invigoration inherent to their very nature.

"What was it you took of him?" asked LaCroix. His voice was tentative, terrified of his own desire.

"Some portion of his power. The exact manifestation will become clear to me in time. Now, I only taste him, and feel him overcome within." Andrei leant towards LaCroix, offering him the overpowering scent and some shred of the wondrous feeling it carried. "I can feel your refusal to partake, how it _maddens_ \- won't you take his taste? You will not _sully_ yourself to take a mere drop of his corpse."

"What is it that you offer?"

Andrei was not stopped - he would not be stopped - as he placed one hand upon the Prince's shoulder, the other tugging with insistence at his waist. He barely kept his claws where LaCroix was clothed, resisting the urge to dig further to such _smooth_ flesh and push this far past their precipice. LaCroix allowed it, eyes lidding and, just as Andrei, closing the distance between them.

The kindness of passing LaCroix the drying blood upon his tongue soon spiralled to unavoidable intimacy, embraced by the both of them. His soft, blunted tongue rubbed slick and supple against Andrei's own, thin and twisting to brush the entrance to his throat. His chest pressed to him firmly, his hands skating with soon-forgotten hesitance over the Tzimisce's robes. The hold, the touching of their lips - it was mundanely enjoyable, yes, but lined with a fiery frustration that the Prince stood still within the confines of humanity's pleasures. He would not allow Andrei to take him far further, to contortions of the form and sharing of the blood, revelling in ways worthy of their kind. His mutable skin could be explored, worked over inch by inch with his craft-

LaCroix retreated from him, blood stringing between their lips as they parted. There was a resigned understanding in his eyes, avoiding Andrei's own, as he swallowed.

"...once more, I request you unhand me."

Reticence groaned in his claws, but he recalled the precipice - and just how much would be ruined if he ignored the Prince's will, enticing as the prospect of overpowering and forcing him was. Andrei withdrew, before the thoughts of passion destroyed those of the practical. 

"Our night draws to a close. Wait a moment with me, as I have a final decision to be made."

LaCroix listened, solemn and quiet.

"In our final month of peace, I intend to make my true haven in close vicinity to your tower. Then, we shall begin." LaCroix nodded, face carefully apathetic, yet the room was steeped with just how much seethed in the silence. Andrei's proposal formed quickly in his mind, spiralling in a fevered spur of the moment. "Yet we could end all here. Meet me in battle, and this would never devolve to the war I see before us - long, and painful."

"My... thanks," replied LaCroix, gently shaking his head, "But no. Another night." He refused Andrei's gaze, fingers tapping quickly upon folded arms. "This shall end another night."

He understood, remaining silent so as to not disrupt LaCroix from his collapsing thoughts. Andrei watched him for a few indulgent seconds more before he made his departure - there was blood still at his mouth, he saw, shining over the curve of his full lips in shades of glorious crimson.


	4. The Third Month

LaCroix knew that he should cease sinking to the lower levels of Venture Tower. He should have months ago - those with objections to be raised were to report to him at his own discretion, within his office. Yes, he decided, this would be the final night of these little dialogues, as their death was long overdue.

Clouds gathered into clinging blackness to suffocate the sky outside, spitting a noisy torrent of rain that reduced his world to only this room of unyielding light. The mirrorlike table stretched long before him, with LaCroix sat at his vantage point at the head, flanked by row upon row of fretting, blathering bodies to which could hardly give individual names.

The talk of the evening was once more drawn long and tortured. Most anything he did could be described as _talk_ , now that the domain was expanding beneath his feet - discussions of where to best allocate resources stretched thinly enough as it were, actions that would not come to pass for many months amongst all of the bumbling agents endlessly deliberating minor points that did not _matter_. Lost to those slipping minutes was the forging of armies, the triumph over places more glorious, all those things he had thought at the tips of his fingers at last. Yet the mundanities still coagulated to a thick, slow poison, swallowed at the wills of those who would have the nerve to name themselves his cohorts.

It was when a woman made mention of a scrap between an unknown attacker and one of her _ghouls_ , no less, that the meaningless of it sunk to his skull, settling as low pain behind his eyes. _Distracting him_ , whispered a mocking thought - they were all distracting him, and the question lay only in whether it was with the intent of a foe or a fool.

"It was around the old hotel, the Hallowbrook," she droned. "Twice in one night. The sorts I've seen around that building are frankly worrying - I surely cannot be the only one who feels that way?"

The room's mingled mutters of agreement ended with all eyes upon him, like a herd of bleating backstabbers. He was their _Prince_ , for God's sake, not their keeper.

" _Thank you_ , for taking our time with such observations," he challenged, cracking them all to silence. "I assure you that the situation is being watched with the utmost care - for the foreseeable future, I suggest you do not send ghouls unmonitored past locales known to be unstable." 

In amongst the woman's defeated nod and all those downturning eyes, LaCroix thought he heard one contemplative, insolent hum. One particular pair of eyes had fixed upon him ceaselessly throughout, decisions ticking unmentioned behind pursed lips. It was the black-haired one, of course, the man who had so constantly prodded at and mocked him... the man who'd had the _gall_ to make his desperately amateur bid at assassination a month past.

LaCroix was convinced of it. Tracing the footprints of the Hollywood attackers had unearthed an endless list of names - all with nothing more than sparse bursts of inconclusive evidence to them, but he _knew_ how it must be this one. The truth screamed clear in his smooth assurance, in just how he eyed his Prince, in his damned _arrogance_ , as if LaCroix did not know his every step. Stupid boy.

To his fickle gaze, LaCroix gave his unrelenting glower. Perhaps, if he spoke with enough strength, it would force them all to understand their place - but he simply did not have the innocence to hope for such an outcome, anymore. 

"...and that will be all, for tonight," he said, before they would have this swallow his night entire. "If there are no objections, I bid you all good evening."

As to whether objections actually did linger on their minds, LaCroix gave no consideration - and his tone had made it most clear that he did not care to. They all stood to only mill from the room, ambling as they tangled themselves in yet more talk, and LaCroix wondered whether it was only the looming deterrent of his Sheriff stood behind him that had him spared from it.

But no, that would not be the end to it. _That_ one chose to strike when LaCroix stood, worming to his side to steal his attention. Well, the Prince would allow him it. Let him relish whatever he saw as his victory for as long as he could.

"Excuse me, my Prince?" he said. His voice was hushed against the bustle of the room, but LaCroix knew that all would be listening with deadly focus. "Just a moment - nothing more, I swear it."

There was a sympathy in his voice and a quick, practised flash of fanged smile. What was the _point_ to it all, when they both know what awaited? "Be quick about it."

The Ventrue nodded, before proceeding with that routine of his. He cast his eyes downwards, took a cold breath, and visibly gathered himself to speak - acting that what he was proposing came at some great cost yet was simply what _needed_ to be said. LaCroix watched him through it, thoroughly unimpressed.

"I share all of our concerns, regarding the movement of nearby Kindred - the activities surrounding the Hallowbrook have been more damaging than, perhaps, you've been able to see. I suspect _Sabbat_ connections." He paused a moment, looking at him with falsely guileless eyes. LaCroix said nothing. "Bold a question as it is, would you... know anything about that?"

Yes, he concluded, he _was_ mocking him, and most definitely behind that attack. Sebastian stood staunchly, assured in the fact that he held a knowledge of what this world truly was, and that before him sat nothing but a viper, small and crushable. To dismiss him as such might have been _bad form_ , yes, but he retained the right to observe that which lay in plain sight.

"It may well be. As I have stated, further investigation must be conducted before deciding the most rational approach."

"Elsewhere, I would agree - but the domain is at the most impressionable it will ever be." His veneer of uncertainty was thinning, his words finding their purchase. "Every action we do or don't take is shaping this city's future for centuries ahead."

He spoke often of this city's future, as so many of these Ventrue did. The future and the course it would wander, with the implication left hanging that there was a certain present linchpin in need of _disposal_. He could feel their condemnation stifling all about him, surging to a sudden point, and knew that this was the moment for it.

A latent progenitor had pointed a torpor-laden finger his way for the things he had dared to dream of, and now he was to be culled for the collective in a flurry of fang, blade and politely averted gazes. Rain battered the tower, as his clanmate shuffled that daring inch closer.

"And, LaCroix," he said, voice low. His hand reached inside his own suit jacket, his movements controlled as though not to spook a leery beast. "That is why I-"

The room had not even emptied, and still he was making his attempt, was he? To prove his might, most likely- as much as they all denied it, power lay at whoever had the ashes smouldering at their feet. He had seen it repeat, decade after decade, as no masque of decorum was enough to conceal how dominance was _truly_ distributed... but LaCroix would not be taken for a fool like this.

" _Still!_ " he barked, lashing his vitae as great iron chains over his underling. Silence spiked with a sharp point, whet by the display of domination considered too brazen for good society. Let them stare at how he had no reason to hide his power, and let them _envy_ how he had his adversary utterly gripped beneath his gaze.

LaCroix gave a sharp snap of his fingers, and a sharper glare to where his Sheriff awaited his word. "Deal with him."

"What-" began the Venture. Ineffable fear spread across his face at the scrape of a sword unsheathed. LaCroix was _drunk_ on that fear, feasting on the devastating victory it surely foresaw. With the stage set and all its players in place, hesitation could be allowed to fester no longer.

" _Do it_."

A choked, strangled gasp punctuated the sound of plunging slickness, and then, the biting ring of the Sheriff's sword meeting the floor as it impaled the Ventrue's stomach through. His hiss was quiet, a feeble sound as his hand sought wildly for purchase on the table behind him, looking down in abject horror at where he was pierced through. This would have usually been a formal execution, a quick and easy beheading - but like this, LaCroix could savour his regret, and give him in long, generous seconds the chance to understand that he had been _bested_. He had spent centuries unable to appreciate this, he thought with some tinge of incredulity, as he continued to stare the younger Ventrue down.

He gave a tender whine as the Sheriff slowly slid his sword back outwards, guts bulging forth around the unyielding metal almost matching the pale, bulbous swell of his agonised eyes. He met his final death quickly, the weakling, his body overtaken by a seizing of tell-tale rigidity and his lips curling over his fangs in a final pathetic firing of survival instinct.

LaCroix was the final thing that Ventrue saw, before his body collapsed to forgettable nothingness.

The murmurs reawakened after his death, no longer taunting mutters of judgement but the cries of those struggling to understand the great disruption smashing their ploys to bloody debris. Before all of them, LaCroix stood proud, vitae resonating firm and constant.

"I have uprooted a weed, this night," he declared. "Let this provide an example for what concludes the path of treachery. Are there any further demands, from any of you?"

They had no answer. The wrinkle of a nose or two, perhaps, and the scandalised glares - it must have been difficult for them, to realise their follies would no longer be tolerated.

"Then _leave_."

There was no more lingering to be had. As commanded, they left him to his corpse, their steps hurried.

A peculiar restlessness was ripping through his veins, afterwards, only growing hungrier with each second LaCroix looked down at the black, blind skull-sockets of what had once been his challenger. Looking away to the window, he saw a vision of endless spires against the horizon, the water blurring it all to a fiery red glow.

What had occurred was triumph, he knew, yet there was still something... nagging, one thin hand of regret running its fingers down his spine with the ebbing the excitement of the charge. That boy could not have been working alone, he reasoned, and the list of implicated names spelled out a thousand different possibilities unchanged by this one victory.

It was as he took the deep scent of drying vitae and dead dust that the realisation dawned. Taming Los Angeles would only bring more of them, as would whatever lay beyond, the call of his own blood bringing the serpents flocking to him in droves. He saw something terrible that plunged to his gut - he saw eternity. A stream of nights unravelled before him, swiftly-repeated lifetimes of beating back the pretenders with neither end nor meaning in sight, now that he had been marked to endure it.

A long-seated pride of his lineage turned to bile in his throat. Just whose choice had it been to make this blood's burden _his_ to bear?

LaCroix shook his head in some pointless effort to dispel the tension at his temples. "Come," he told his Sheriff, collecting himself for the night he saw ahead. "We're leaving."

\---

Rain rolled heavy over LaCroix's body, soaking his coat through, as he waited upon a Hollywood doorstep. Tomorrow night, this place would no longer exist - a swift blow from his strongest would raze this nest to nothing but the stench of burning flesh. For the time being, however, he would take his dues before that eternity of his, and beat the door with a force that rattled the glass within its panes.

It may have been a misstep to allow this unliving thing to grow for these months, that much he would acknowledge. The forces at the hotel had gathered in greater force than he had anticipated, and each lost minute took him closer to the night the brunt of their bloodlust would turn to himself, just as he had been promised. And yet, had he not been granted this mercy and extended his branch in return, those earlier, stumbling nights could have effortlessly been made his last - were his nights _truly_ so numbered, for so long as he stood at the head of the Camarilla-?

The Tzimisce had taken some time to answer his door, but answer he did. With that gust of balmy, rancid air, the doors opened to reveal him, stood with claws not folded neatly but smeared bloody at his side. This monster stood a world away from those within his tower, and for a singular second, he wondered how existence within that world might feel. 

"You had not announced your presence."

"I did not, forgive me. I only have want of one final discussion, before..." He did not say it. "If you would allow me entrance."

The Tzimisce was scouring him, he could tell as much from his trenchant gaze, raking over his dismally drenched form. LaCroix allowed it. Deception layered to a heavy, tiring armour that, for once, he could cast aside.

"Enter, then."

LaCroix readily followed when the Tzimisce turned, descending for a second time into the den. The scent did not seem quite so offensive as he recalled, despite the fact that it seemed to have fallen further to infestation. In the place of lifeless puddles of skin, raw sinew now pulled across the walls with firm tension, drumming gently with each step the Tzimisce took.

"My work preoccupies me," he said, ascending his staircase to the parlour in which they had talked before, some two months ago now. "I shall continue as I hear you."

"Of course," he replied, following deeper, the reflex to turn away deadening quickly. But he couldn't quite lose himself to a careless distraction, not as he still felt yet another presence _watching_ him in perpetuity - LaCroix stopped his Sheriff in place with a pointed look and a quick word that he was to _wait here_. All reason would be cast aside, for the irrational desire to be alone with the Tzimisce.

The Tzimisce did not take one of those closely gathered chairs, but stalked instead to the space that had once been a kitchen, before it had been gutted and stuffed with vicissitude. A softly pulsating mass of flesh sat upon the makeshift marble workbench, half of a limp arm leading to half of a hipbone, perhaps connected to a throat - a messy tangle too incoherent to be followed. Beside it lay the parts of a meticulously bared skeleton, with two sets of bones resembling some variety of limb, connecting to shoulderblades affixed directly to a heavy, brutish skull. A plan to be built upon, Sebastian saw, as the Tzimisce pulled a handful from the bloody mound of flesh and painted it over the bone. His long, clawed fingers stroked with such nimbleness, massaging tendon to cling to the skeletal limbs until glossy red crept in long vines over the yellow.

"What final words do you have?" asked the Tzimisce with his voice throaty and slow, halfway entranced in his own craft. LaCroix thought back to his evening, and... could not give a quick answer.

"I'm unsure how you tolerate it," was where he landed, eventually.

"Tolerate what?"

"All of this - if some small fraction of what you say is correct, it would madden me. I see only years _wasted_ , behind and before me." He sighed sharply. "Is this what you have been attempting to show me, to incite me towards?"

Not a fierce chine upon the Tzimisce's face moved. "I have not been pulling you anywhere. I share my word where I am able, and can only hope some small handful of the degenerated Camarilla Cainite will find the boldness to follow."

"I've no intention to follow, allow me to make as much clear. Yet your words stick - you've tempted me, do you wish me to admit it?"

The Tzimisce allowed the fleshy sloughs to fall formless from his claws. Blood oozed aged and congealed from the room's every crevice, an undercurrent of hot sweat permeating the air from the very walls. Once more, the scaffolds of flesh pulsed with their master's movements as he set his work aside, nearing where LaCroix hovered in uncertainty. He looked over the Tzimisce's shoulders, broad beneath his finery, his callously angular features and his crests with their unearthly elegance.

"Tell me truthfully why it was you came here."

He did not speak unkindly, precisely, but he strung his voice to dire seriousness. A precise answer eluded LaCroix once more, in amongst all the muddled thoughts of spite, of intents, and the urge to take something simply because he _could_. One option, however, was undoubtedly the simplest, as well as the one he knew to be entirely true.

"To ask you grant me that same satisfaction once more." He reached to touch the Tzimisce - only fingertips light over the point of his hip, but clear enough in his intent. "As this is the final chance I have."

The Tzimisce had rarely smiled during this strange affair of theirs, but now, the pleasure that twisted his features was a thing to behold. He held an infectiously unabashed confidence bolstered by something predatory, something cruel, unmasking a unique power LaCroix could only welcome.

"This much, I may give."

\---

The Tzimisce's predictably flesh-flooded chambers were the most unusual he had been led to in some time - not that LaCroix partook these nights, as facing an endless barrage of death and distrust left little time for those slow, pleasurable evenings dallying with whatever men he chose. The implications of resuming only to claim a Sabbat leader did not pass him by but, as with all, that would be dwelled upon later. 

"A moment - your name," said Sebastian. "You have one, yes?"

The Tzimisce studied him, some offhand bemusement behind the gold of his eyes. "Andrei," he offered simply.

LaCroix nodded. That would make this less regretful to think back to, at the least, though he caught only too late how it might twist in his stomach when it came time to put him to the sword.

He was pulled from the thought by hands guiding him to sheets of stiff skin, and a cool mouth against his own. Though their lips had met before, to kiss him was a continual curiosity, both in that the Tzimisce - Andrei - would allow the touch, and in the sensation of it. His lips were tough yet oddly smooth, his tongue flicking with a dangerous point over his own as they settled to the sound of creaking bones at the headboard - the headboard that had a ghoulish face hung as its centerpiece, staring at nothingness with glazed eyes. The thing was soon another thought thrown from a mind occupied elsewhere, caught by the claws wandering his body to leave long, bloody streaks and deftly unbutton his coat, as Sebastian found himself unsure of just how he might reciprocate it. The Tzimisce's proudly curving spines were striking, a reminder of his monstrosity that titillated in ways most unclean, yet they made even the simple act of running his hands over his body into something more complex.

"Do not have such fear," demanded Andrei, hooking LaCroix closer with a claw at his back. It was not _fear_ , only etiquette - LaCroix did not have the time to correct him, with the slick, rhythmic thrusts of a pointed tongue down his throat. He demonstrated his eagerness instead by groping over him, down over his legs, unsure if he was to expect a body as hard and chitinous as his skull. Those concerns were banished by the sturdy curves of muscle upon his thighs, and that the broadness of his chest and shoulders was not merely from the cut of his clothing. Andrei moved downwards to mouth roughly at his throat, sharp bone brushing against Sebastian's cheek to send a shudder that, though unfamiliar, was anything but unpleasant.

" _A pity_ ," came a growl, gruff and absent, as fangs scraped heavily over the teasing edge of cutting to Sebastian's throat. For Andrei to bite that little bit further _would_ burst this burgeoning desire to true, dizzying pleasure, but Sebastian forced himself from thoughts of blood and vitae in all its complexities, when he could occupy himself instead with the simplicity of having a fiercely handsome Tzimisce halfway in his lap and how he was hardening for it. He dismissed the comment with a noncommittal hum, his wants diverting to what had, admittedly, lurked his mind perhaps from the first instance he had laid eyes upon him - just what this man's cock might look like.

A pleasing girth waited between the scarlet robes pooled about the two of them, under the old, fine fabrics of his trousers. Sebastian's want for him was a hungering beast, surging forward with fingers fiddling quickly to have what he would, as merely palming at him would not gratify this itch. Andrei gave a guttural little sound as finally, he tugged him free with an attentive eye.

His cock stood great and thick, a dark grey-green flushing red towards its tip, familiar in shape if not for its sleek smoothness lacking in any prepuce, and the slender barbs flexing back from its tapered head. He trailed a hand both trepidant and tantalised up the firm weight of his sack, hanging the deep colour of fruit ripe enough to rot, before toying up his sadistic spear of a shaft. His thick veins pulsed heavily beneath Sebastian's fingertips as they were forced to life, those prongs twitching with the Tzimisce's arousal. He allowed Sebastian's searching hands to reveal _more_ , clawing into his garb until he saw how the peaks of his hips were smattered with scale, how the anatomy of his thighs flexed in minute detail beneath skin clinging exposingly thin, and how he possessed a vertical chasm running his torso in the place of a navel.

He wandered his eyes back to his cock, resting loosely within his own hand. Those barbs were a terrifying allure, the his own arousal building to a painful poke beneath his suit as he wondered just how they might rub, how they might _press_ -

"Not this night, _Sebastian_ ," said Andrei, the sound of his name as excitingly violating as the direct answer to his own thoughts. His claws were between his own legs, sharp little pricks working him free to the humid air to release just a fraction of his immense pressure. Now sitting fully astride the Prince, his body made for a riling display, resting just a fingerwidth above where he was swollen and needful for his rippling, bestial body.

"What do you propose, then?" he asked - in no particularly selective mood, but burning to have this _proceed_. The Tzimisce answered with a grab for Sebastian's hand, guiding it upwards and parting his death-tinted lips. Andrei's tongue flicked long, thin and dexterous to encourage him to his mouth, past his fangs and yet deeper, a quiet determination on his severe face even as he wrapped his tongue with obscene flexibility about his fingers. And his _throat_ \- it gave a sinuous flutter, clutching wetly in a way that had him thinking of the unmatched pleasure he could reap, if he were to take hold the Tzimisce's crowned skull and fuck down his alien throat. It was yet another vision forgotten, however, as Andrei soon guided his hand from his lips, now dripping with a bountiful regurgitation of saliva tinged red in places with what must have been his vitae. Sebastian would not question his inner workings.

He glided his hand down, stroking over the jut of his cock, beneath his sack and past the stripe of skin leading to the nestle of his hole - Sebastian felt his own arousal climb to a pinnacle yet higher, as he revealed his intentions laying just where he had hoped they might. The texture was just as novel here, firm as leather yet gliding past easier than snakeskin, Andrei's body devoid of hair even deep between his thighs. Any oddness to the sensation was offset by the ease with which he could rub a slicked fingerpad over that twitching furl, precisely where he had been invited. Andrei's body jerked forwards, his eyes as sharp as his tautly-pulled stomach, as Sebastian slid a single finger into him.

The Tzimisce adjusted his body with ease, yielding with perfect smoothness as he plunged himself to the knuckle, enough that he would stretch yet still with a hold he knew would drag well over his cock. Through it, Andrei watched with luminous eyes lidded, a glimpse of his fang and just the tip of his tongue showing. The image was made so provokingly complete with the rocking of his hips and the hushed hisses, growling how he appreciated the vulgar stretch of what was soon three fingers, probing across his supple guts.

"Long enough," growled the Tzimisce. He pulled his claws to his mouth with a hacking sort of wretch before, just as Sebastian, he reached lower with his fingers shining. He was at his cock, slipping over him with a brief groping grasp that had the Ventrue moaning his encouragement. Andrei was taking what he wished of him efficiently indeed, but Sebastian would allow it - provided he could be buried within him before long.

With a claw digging to Sebastian's shoulder, Andrei guided his hole to just kiss the head of his cock, looking down at him with a curve to his back like a rearing cobra, coupled with a knowing, toying gaze. Sebastian could not have said if it were rage or desire that ignited as he was coaxed in such a way, but it spurred him on greedy instinct to flare his vitae, bleeding a rich delirium such that Andrei would have no desire for even the slightest attempt at resistance as he pulled him those crawling, infuriating inches downward. Finally he felt the one place where, behind the spines of bone and bloodstained claws, the Tzimisce welcomed his cock with such softness, such _tightness_.

A second claw dug to Sebastian's shoulder, possibly fraying his coat through. He stroked upwards with an inhumanly precise manipulation of his innards, catching over the head of his cock with a veritable stranglehold, then clamping harshly when he dropped himself down and sheathed Sebastian once more. The Ventrue groaned, beginning his own pace briskly - he had never been particularly patient in these pursuits, and this grand creature was not one of those pathetic boys of past nights, the ones who would wince and whine as Sebastian merely took what he was entitled to.

Indeed, Andrei instead leaned down, shoving him to the bed with claws scoring to his scalp, his snakelike tongue lunging past his lips. The cold taste of blood diluted with decay slid down Sebastian's neck as strong, pistoning curves of muscle surrounded his body and wrapped flush around his cock.

As their mouths parted, his urgent upwards rut was met with Andrei's downwards strikes of wrecking rigor, the Tzimisce's bloated shaft and swollen sack slapping down to his stomach. His cock was weeping, Sebastian saw, spewing a strong line onto his shirt - but it seemed rather late to be worrying over a stain or two.

Yet the Tzimisce was distracted, running claws urgently down over his own bared torso. Sebastian would have assumed he was to grasp his own cock - but his claws found their purchase instead in the crevice that drew dark down his stomach.

"What are you-" began Sebastian breathlessly when the smell of vitae shot sudden to the room. The answer did not matter overmuch, as he slammed himself all the harder to that intoxicating scent, throbbing for this frenzy. Andrei did not provide one in words, anyhow.

His thrusts did not falter even as he watched Andrei deepen that split, pushing his claws inwards and slicing himself in two.

The Ventrue adjusted to the sight as though it were dazzling sunlight, groans puffing coarse with shocked wonder. His organs were full and bloody, untouched by the desiccation of a long death, sculpted and swirling and _symmetrical_. His entrails were meticulously arranged into closely-packed patterns and intercut with unnaturally angled ribs extending far down to his stomach, slowly parting like a great maw. To allure was the last thing he ought have expected of the sight, but even he could see the painstaking mastery behind this creation and recognise that he was privy to something incomprehensibly intimate. There was a ravenous need in the Tzimisce's eyes as he bared himself, so _eager_ to be witnessed as he rode atop him with innards swaying yet holding fast - so firm, virile and strong.

" _Come_ ," gasped Andrei, fangs now bared constantly in a blurred line between savage and carnal. His hand was at his wrist, again, this time touching over where he had left his mark, his brand alive and buzzing through Sebastian's every vein. "Grasp it, Prince, do not fear for my flesh!"

As unusually hypnotic as the display of his innards was, bouncing and dripping messily with his thrusts, Sebastian thought instead of retreating to grip at his cock, to work at the Tzimisce more conventionally and feel a safer, satisfying throb - before he caught himself falling to the throes of cowardice again. An opportunity to foray further presented itself, and he ought _take_ it. Timed with a powerful stab of his cock and an answering squeeze of Andrei's hole, Sebastian refused himself his hesitance. He sunk an errant hand deep to his wet, cushioned hold, curling his fingers around one of his perfectly sculpted parts. He wrenched it free to a spatter of mingling fluids, running almost warm across his own stomach.

Andrei snarled, eyes blazing down at where he was spilling carelessly and wetting Sebastian's shirt with his sticky, splayed flesh. It left a ruined opening, gaping dark and gleaming, simply _beckoning_ the Ventrue. He slid deeper to his wrist, his hand forcing Andrei's writhing, smooth body aside, curious fingers touching upwards, towards his heart. Tucking his thumb to his palm, he acted only on fervid impulse, vitae leaking like spend from a well-fucked hole with drive of his arm. The tension mounted between them, rising until Andrei gave his rasping, rapturous assent in a language that Sebastian did not know.

His innards constricted about his wrist, followed by a ruthless squeeze over Sebastian's cock. Andrei's finishing moan nearly sounded pained, like an animal meeting a particularly vicious end, as he spurted a heavy lot of spend and draped long, pale ropes over the bloody mess the Prince was already laying in. Sebastian snatched Andrei's shaft in hand just as he tightened his hold within his torso, skating curiously over spines now standing sharply erect with his release and wringing out every last droplet of defilement to wallow in. With a final grind to the Tzimisce's sweet, spasming hole, Sebastian joined him, unable to do anything beneath the onslaught but groan his gratification and pump him full.

Thus, it finished. The waves of pleasure receded to raw quivering, leaving the only evidence of their hurried coupling as the pungent smell of seed and splayed, dead innards. Andrei lifted himself from his cock with one final, lingering tug, leaving him to fall softened and dazed to the repugnant sheets.

These minutes afterwards he usually spent in rest, respite or occasional regret, perhaps tiredly telling the other man to leave him be, so as to not waste more of his time. With Andrei, however, he watched the Tzimisce mend himself with languid strokes of his claws. He gave pleased sighs as he gathered his strewn body, warping and welding his muscle and skin with eyes sliding contentedly shut.

The utter bizarreness of the sight did nothing to stop its odd endearment, striking LaCroix with some force. Curious - what had once endeared usually only irritated and disgusted after Sebastian had finished, and yet _here_ lay the exception.

"Is that _truly_ pleasurable, to you?" he asked tiredly, propping himself up on his elbows. "Or simply an expectation?"

"I had thought you would know such things, in light of your... companion. Did it unnerve you?"

After a startled moment, LaCroix saw just whom he was referring to - the sorts of observations that even the most veiled allusions towards would have been gravely taboo most anywhere else. "Ah, no, he-" He chose his next words carefully. "I had not witnessed such things before."

"Indeed," said Andrei, yet there was a flat edge to his words. "You demonstrate an admirable control, to even keep him deprived so."

Any misplaced affection had vanished from his gaze, and whatever took its place was unwelcome indeed, a chill piercing LaCroix uncomfortably with just what he might have known. Beneath the pressure of scrutiny, to the suddenly rushing worry that causing offense might have spoiled whatever short minutes they still had, he saw no option but to speak in quick defense. " _Control_ is not the word I would use - only a separate modus operandi, one that might have it seem such a way."

Even if the Tzimisce still thought the point one for debate, he had the grace to say nothing.

Their redressing was quiet, clothing somewhat reclaimed from the hold of unthinkable things, all made as clean as it could be in a place such as this. As Andrei stood, his posture as rigid and dignified as it had ever been, LaCroix understood that their time had come to a close, and that a swift exit was the only rational option left.

Yet as he too stood, he was halted by Andrei's hand pressing firm and respectful at his shoulder. "I thank you for our time," he said, "and I do not regret it. Attend your city, for as long as you are able."

It all rushed back as such a wretched tide, crashing against his very resolve until LaCroix could give nothing more than a nod. He knew how he needed to return to his tower, that there were so very many plans to be resumed - he had avoided the finer details of just how he would lead the initial attacks upon the Sabbat, and yet the time for it had befallen him all the same.

If it could be called _leading_ , trapped far above the city where all words could hiss as they pleased to his ear. He struggled to see how all of that could simply _resume_ after he had granted himself this taste of something else, invigorating and whole down his throat.

"No," he said, before he could truly think. "No - one more question, if you would grant me it."

Claws tightened on his shoulder. "I would."

"These hypotheticals you speak in," he began, standing at the brink of simply leaving this stone unturned. "Unknowable tethers, every whisper you have cast. What solution could you possibly propose to them?"

"The answers are many," answered the Tzimisce immediately, "some simple, and some complex. All of them a path most fear to embrace." His hand slid over LaCroix's shoulder, inching steadily closer to his throat. "But it begins in the vaulderie."

"Yes, of course. It begins in binding oneself to the Sabbat." Why would he have expected an answer any less tiring?

"Such is not necessary. The cutting of primordial cords and uniting of new forces - it is only a natural conclusion of the process that our numbers would bind." LaCroix frowned, his intrigue daring to stir once more. "If we were to partake, we would spawn a fledgling half-bond between ourselves, and nothing more."

"And if that bond were formed," ventured Sebastian, "with one of us to be destroyed at a time soon approaching..."

"Then that one final binding would be severed."

There at last, he saw the chance this all had been leading towards - shining, flitting thing that it was, something that he trembled to reach for and that would surely burn him if he tried. Only one more question, he told himself. _Just as he had told himself the previous time._

"What is it - what is it that is _done_?"

"Do you truly wish to see?" Andrei took his face in both claws, harsh and serious at his cheekbones. His face twisted further than it had in pleasure, to something that could no longer have been dead, alive as it was with raging desire. LaCroix was sure that such a monstrous, beautiful visage would etch itself firmly into his mind, to never go forgotten regardless of what was to pass.

"A glimpse shall suffice." Did he even believe the words himself? "Show me."

\---

The sensation was not as LaCroix had expected.

He had braced himself for a painful parting that might shatter his soul, or even for the barbaric ritual he had foolishly cast himself before to end all. Instead, the slurry of time afterwards held a distinct and heavy sense of quiet, calming in its own way, as though a wavering presence had departed him and left nothing but cold. Maybe it was the stillness of death, without blood pulled so tumultuously that it would shield him from it - he did not know if it was unpleasant.

He opened his eyes to meet an even, amber gaze.

"I smell your regret," said Andrei, "and your fear - throw them aside. They will not serve you in this existence."

"Yes, yes, I can see that, I..." His words evaded his grasp, unable quite to describe the passage of his thoughts.

"Gather yourself here, if you wish it. A hold made centuries deep does not release easily."

LaCroix had never been one for long, luxuriant moments of rest, but his body _did_ indeed feel oddly hindered, to say nothing of how following the Tzimisce's word was an easy feat. As he gave his vague agreement and Andrei spoke in turn of attending ought elsewhere - specifics washed uselessly past him - he wondered if this would be the last time he laid eyes upon him, before they would fight a bloody end for the sake of very little.

He closed his eyes, mind reeling as he still attempted to comprehend. He might have felt weaker as the door clicked shut, or he might have merely felt alone.

Reclining upon a skeletal bed with Sabbat blood on his tongue and Sabbat seed over his clothing was not where he belonged, but he could not bring himself to disrupt this lull. Through it, a dread began its creep, the gaping and consuming maw of an abyss unknowable. Was this the reality of his very existence - knowledge observed yet indecipherable, so that it could manifest solely in a terrible fear of just what awaited? He'd had no idea, throughout all those decades, that the clarity of freedom would present itself like _this_. 

He'd felt that terror before, hadn't he? Yes, those early nights, what few memories he could still muster of his embrace - it could be only the terror of a new power at one's fingertips. LaCroix would refuse complacency for even a moment more, as even if the uncertainty of his own fate shook to his very core, to flee it was not an option. Shuffling upwards, he knew that this was only a passing thing to be forged to determination, and from that, conquest. When he stood, he forced himself to do so with dignity.

Thoughts of nights ahead moved shapelessly, thoughts of how best to seize... whatever this was. He refused to fall to where he had been, to compulsively bend himself to every passing will - a more resolute fist as that traitor had suggested might have, in honestly, been a genuine idea. The petty complexities of Princehood could wait, however, as his final act of the night was clear. A genuine farewell was due.

He did not find the Tzimisce upon his upper floor, and nor was he constructing the unwieldy thing upon his kitchen table. At the house's entryway, he found only those paintings, staring down at him with the same pinning eyes beneath a different light. Yet LaCroix could sense, somehow, how he _must_ have been near; turning his head, he saw another staircase, this one leading down into darkness. A warning shiver brushed his body - yet more weakness, more that he would _not_ be beholden to anymore. With his head raised high, he began his descent.

The smell of vicissitude had faded from his senses with the time he had passed here, but as he sunk lower, the malformed blood fell in a thick mist once again. With it came silence, his footsteps resounded loud as the house's ever-present hum of flesh became fearfully hush. That was, until he heard Andrei's voice permeate the fog, pulling him to step forth into what he saw was a vast basement, stone-walled where it lay bare. It was a room of strung bodies and flaking fluids, musty death clinging to the cracks and, out of the shadow, the unmistakable red of the Tzimisce's robes.

LaCroix soon saw that Andrei was not alone.

Around a central table, stained like a sacrificial altar, his Sheriff leant close to the Tzimisce, eyes attentive upon him with a keenness LaCroix had last seen a lifetime ago. Andrei quieted, ending whatever _conversation_ they had been engaging, as they both looked his way.

"Welcome, Cainite," said Andrei, invitation and sincerity abundant in his voice. "Join us. If you would heed my word once more..."

But Andrei's voice no longer reached LaCroix, as he dared to understand what he saw. In the faint light, he saw the telling scarlet over the Nagloper's lips and the cold shock forcing his stonelike features from their slumber. It darkened slowly to revelation, and eventually, a glare of deep, disbelieving fury.

It seemed that his Sheriff was paying the Tzimisce no heed, either, as he drew himself to his full height and trod a decisive path, directly towards LaCroix. His bloody lips twitched, baring a sliver of his many vicious fangs as the Ventrue merely stood rooted, his bodily strength frozen to stiffness. LaCroix had bid for his own freedom, his thoughts jabbered frantically, this did not concern any other - this was not - not _this_ \- 

He needed to flee.

LaCroix found his will at long last, shooting aligned with his instincts to depart this place immediately, to never again see this orgy of twisted flesh and burn these two infernal Tzimisce within it if he needed to. He backed towards the stairs, legs coiling to spring and bolt. The Nagloper was faster than him, of course, to have hoped otherwise was a foolish naivety - even in all their years together, with his fangs blunted and power leashed, LaCroix had never forgotten just how terrifying the beast could be. He surged forwards, his claw snatching a heavy fistful of his shirt and wresting the Ventrue closer. His other claw was upon his face, old and coarse, the points of his fingers gashing down his cheeks as he held his jaw firmly in place. His stare was nearly as sickening as his overpowering scent, his rasping growl building to reverberate loud and livid from his mighty chest.

LaCroix pulled against his grip, as he had seen so many do before him, but the Nagloper's hands were nothing short of manacles. His illucid thoughts raced for his own survival and - yes, he had beaten this creature before, a century ago, and he could pierce his mind all the same. Willing his hysteria to subside, LaCroix met his stare, savagely willful. " _Cease this_!" he cried, forcing his vitae forward with mind-splitting brutality. "You will release me, you will _cease this_!"

Relief had never crashed so welcome over LaCroix as when the beast's face softened and his claws relaxed their grip. His eyes retreated back to the docile and harmless state that suited them best, staring with dull fascination - and all the Ventrue needed was to continue to hold that gaze, until all was as it should be. The hope he clung to was frail and distant, yet all those years could not simply _vanish_ , could they? LaCroix imposed his disciplines to rend his Sheriff beneath his dominion, welcoming him to the simplicity of unquestioning love once more.

Both of the Nagloper's claws crept upwards, moving with an almost reverential slowness over LaCroix's cheeks. He could do nothing but take a terrified mouthful of stagnant air, his commands dying in his throat. The sharp points of his thumbs came to rest on the surface of his eyes, his thick fingers cradling his head such that he could not flinch away - the final thing he saw in his blurred, blotted vision was the Nagloper's stare, and his clawed thumbs shaking with a fear mirroring LaCroix's own.

"Cease - stop, don't-" His voice quivered, his vitae failed. Then, the Nagloper _pushed_.

His eyes ached as they were shoved further back to his sockets, further than they ever should have been, birthing a pressure that had a terrified cry passing his lips unbidden. Then, his thumbs curved inwards to press their points, to focus that pressure and lance it through to a sudden, excruciating apex, dousing all in agonising red-black. They must have burst, chimed some distantly disbelieving part of his own mind, still capable of thought through the violation of his own skull. It must have been his eyes that he felt, running wet and viscous down his face.

Blood threatened to rush up his throat at the nauseating sensation of dirty air inside his sockets, blowing cool over the viscera where he could feel his lids sticking and sinking. LaCroix staggered through a sea of unfathomable blackness, his only anchor the two claws still holding his face with the silently thrumming threat of vicissitude. There was no way to know what shoved at his shoulders, only that his fractured balance and the distraction of agony had him effortlessly defeated, his shoulders and skull hitting heavily to the cold, hard floor. He could not even see where to stumble, where to regain himself, his utter vulnerability igniting despair as he had never known.

Another stray thought drifted amongst the frenzy - the thought of whether Andrei still watched, as the weight of the Nagloper settled atop his body. Perhaps this defeat had been his intent from the beginning, or perhaps it was only a pleasing sight for the monster. He could lend it no real reflection, as he could lend _nothing_ his real reflection, descending quickly to a state that knew only sensation and fear.

The heavy weight atop him shifted to his legs, immovably strong thighs bracketing his own and crushing him to the ground. LaCroix gave his one final, failing effort to slip from beneath the unseen monster, to shove him aside and _off_ of him.

It was useless. Buttons and clothing were brushed aside as effortlessly as his straining limbs, until rough fingers rested just below his sternum. In the frigid moment of anticipation LaCroix heard his own whimpers, steeped in his own pathetic dread for a time stretched much too long and yet over much too soon. It ended when those claws punctured his skin, and ripped the Ventrue open.


	5. Epilogue

The pleasure to walk the world openly was one for which Andrei had pined.

Timidity had always felt an ill-fitting garb, since those nights of his youth when he had enjoyed how the kine cowered from his admittedly amateur experimentations of the flesh. Later, he grew to simply appreciate how a single glance to his body struck chords of revulsion and awe that had his role clarified to all in an instant. Usefully natural as sticking to the shadows had become these past few months, this particular sweep of Los Angeles was one more territory where he could shake that shroud. Andrei passed buildings newly abandoned and fire-blackened, past fledglings and elder alike partaking wanton acts hardly tucked to the alleyways, before arriving before the doors of Venture Tower. 

As a bastion, it had proven itself invaluable. The tower kept a cautious distance from the Eastern threat, for the time being, and provided a martial breeding ground of such size that nearby Cainite had no choice but to accept Sabbat presence - and that was to say nothing of its use as a foothold from which to spring several swift, significant strikes. Of those that had called themselves Anarchs, the ones who had not been assimilated or destroyed now disbanded easily, and it had taken only a brief struggle before the Tremere blight had been purged in ways that the Tzimisce would fondly recount for decades to come.

The smell of vicissitude within the entrance was still remarkably subtle, nothing more than the occasional nerve-flecked vine twitching fleshborne messages to a web spread across the high ceiling. Cracks sunk to the dark marble, lights sat with dark bulbs, and the tower rested this night in a state of deep, dark slumber. It would not have done as a haven for the Tzimisce, all of it echoing too empty and impersonal without being remade in its entirety - but he would not pass those judgements beneath another's roof.

The sixth floor awaited him firstly, as the floor where the... _Nagloper_ had taken his residence. The penthouse could wait. Anticipation crept warm and growing, until it became a fire steadily stoked within - such had always been the case before the vaulderie, though this month's was with a ferocity unforeseen.

\---

For another month, the Nagloper accepted his vinculum.

That much was a reassurance, as the behemoth still hesitated to take his true place amongst the Sabbat. The support he had lent thus far might have been merely transitory interest, or a debt paid - but Andrei trusted it to become more, with the strength of the blood he felt growing so potent between them. He would find his pack yet.

Yet even as it rested as a delectable aftertaste, thick on his tongue and heavy in his gullet, those discussions were not the ones to be pushed - not as the Nagloper waited before him, stood steadfast within his den. Fleshwork flowered more bountifully here, tissue clinging to the debris of an emptied kine bureau and skin stretched over windows lit ethereally translucent, shining a warm light to the Nagloper's weary, broken features.

"These coming nights," said Andrei, continuing with the necessities before losing himself in possibilities, "the tower shall be put to use once more. A mass regnant of great prowess intends to spawn a brood to drown these streets, and this haven will suit such forces best."

The Nagloper nodded, even as Andrei had not strictly asked his blessing. Any concept of rank paled against the staggering power of the elder vampire - a power he allowed himself some modicum of respect towards at last. No further words came, but such was to be expected of a creature so mired in mourning as he, nursing his shattered bond with reserved eyes.

"I cannot say that the prior victory over this territory could be claimed by anyone but you. Tell me, do you believe the same will be said again?"

And still, the creature had no answer, save for a deeper crease to his brow. Yet even as lost as he was, Andrei felt how he had tempted him with the promise of slaughter, and the thought that perhaps through this stumbling uncertainty, a feast of blood and battle would be what made him whole. Andrei would see that great beast who had razed his haven and annihilated his brethren once more, but the next time, he would walk with _will_ in his step.

Though the seconds trickled past with his question hanging still, he did not yet inflict any demands. The answer was written clearly enough in the blood tinting both their lips.

"But now, another matter. One I believe requires your... permission." The Nagloper tilted his head, drawing back in suspicion - to be expected, of a man who had only recently acquired the concept of permission. "I intend to proceed to the uppermost floor."

The slant of the Nagloper's nose twitched, his jaw locked tight. What lay behind his eyes was dead and dull no longer, as a bitter fire kindled. Rage, regret and possessive instinct spewed intermingling to a single streak of hurt as the beast's old maw parted - Andrei stood with respectful attention, even as he braced himself against whatever was to be hissed forth.

The Nagloper closed his mouth, and gave a quiet, growling sigh. His permission was granted with a broad hand of extended claws, gesturing broadly towards the tower's lifts. Permission, and a clear signal to take his leave.

Andrei did not pry further. He would pull those words from him in time.

The steel doors awaited through fleshy curtains, and as the Archbishop approached, he saw how the Nagloper's minions had huddled to them, spitting little gurgling chitters at his approach. Their flesh was vampiric, he noted, ashen skin stretched over elongated limbs and hooked legs, hanging to the ceiling where their doughy forms clung like great pale spiders. Previous occupants, perhaps... what they had once been mattered little in the face of flesh ever-changing. He disregarded them, and stepped forth. 

The kine machinery carried him with sickly sputters, its mechanisms jammed with splendid infestation. Before long, the remains of this tower would fail, leaving it to be rebirthed wholly in bone and flesh. An obelisk to mark a city soon to die, and in turn live again.

\---

The uppermost floor held deafening quiet. Flesh ceased its murmur during his ascent, its scent fading past perception, until finally, before him lay only a stretch of marble to an oaken door. Much as an inexplicable, unbecoming reservation had settled its fingers about his throat, he had waited much too long already to crack forth this secret.

The doors whined as he entered.

Before him lay a vision of lapsed grandeur, the gleaming of flowing wood and golden trim masked beneath its veneer of blanching dust. This place did not run rich and red, the Prince's court instead left in lightless torpor with moonlight tainting it a solemn, dead blue. From within came the call of a single presence, strewn and jittering with restlessness. 

"Announce yourself," rang a sudden voice. Brittle as though torn through broken shards of bone, ailing and afraid but not beyond recognition.

"I assume you had not been informed of my passing here."

The buzzing panic soothed to something more softly simmering. Andrei urgently examined its source - a high-backed chair, sat before an empty, cool fireplace.

"Ah. _You_ ," replied LaCroix, his voice withering to a hush. "I have been informed of... little."

Stood before him, the Tzimisce was surprised to see his state. LaCroix's skin was unblemished and his body remained intact, if not with something implacably gaunt and haggard in his form. The only true rooting of vicissitude was in the scoring of his eyes - or rather, in the deep, dark pits facing the Archbishop's vague direction. On peering closer, Andrei saw not only how they had been burst and carved hollow, but attended to since with considerable care. The shredded edges of his eyelids had been trimmed back, his nerves no longer howled their piercing agony, and the vessels had been closed against excessive bleeding.

It was what lay within his body that Andrei was less certain of. His nails dug deep to the arm of his chair, clinging with the desperate strength of a man hanging from a cliff-edge. His straight back had become a subtle hunch, gathering himself back to the chair as what little territory he could still claim, giving restless twitches from any distant noise. Andrei knew well that blindness made for ease of keeping, but also the costs with which it weighed - costs such as paranoia and creeping of delirium made all the more potent in ennui, wearing darkly on the Ventrue's presence. 

The pathetic thing should have disgusted him.

"Your body has mended well," commented Andrei, in absolute truth. With the state that the Nagloper had taken him to on that stormy night, he was stunned to have not witnessed his final death.

LaCroix took a long moment to give a rigid nod and a shuddering exhale. "I believe so, yes. I can only wonder if there's some fragment of will I still wield, as he disliked the _excess_ of physical harm. Reliance is the torture he's chosen - I had thought as much obvious."

Andrei said nothing. The words were nothing more than resentment given voice, after all.

"Reliance is reciprocal by nature," LaCroix continued to chatter. "That thing learned it quickly - some truths aren't forgotten so easily. Not until he tires of my use, at least - and until then, _this_ stretches on."

Andrei bent to place a hand next to where his fingers had begun a tap as rapid and aimless as his words. Not touching their skin, but close enough to make his presence known. "You must understand consequence to be only a sign of true choice. There is a beauty to be found in that fact-"

"Yes, I am starting to understand it well." He craned his neck further in Andrei's direction, searching for his face with hopeless black holes. "And to understand that this _beauty_ is what you planned to show me from the very start. I cannot imagine what possessed me, to trust any different from your every step, _fiend_ , when you wished to see only _this_ -"

"No," answered the Archbishop quickly, and forcefully. "Whatever path you set yourself upon long ago, it is not my place to sway it. I did nothing more than take your word, just as you had taken mine."

" _My thanks_ ," replied LaCroix, sinking resigned back to his chair.

Before Andrei sat a shaking heap of mutilated pride and deformed thoughts, and to it, the sensation that should have been revulsion raised a forlorn head once again. It was an ache that he only half-knew, one with the driving force of a frenzy yet the slowness of torpor, culminating in unfamiliar instinct. As he followed it, sliding his claws to meet the Ventrue's fingers and still their twitching, Andrei understood, and saw the truth of why he had come here this night.

He had never before known mercy.

"Do you recall the offer I extended, to end all before it began? I did not wish to see you waste." Words were spilling forth, carrying realisations to Andrei as much as Sebastian. This want was his to see and pursue, his _alone_ in ways new and heady, as it reached its head and ruptured. "I extend my hand once more. On the word I shall strike you down, swiftly and surely. Your final death shall come this night if you wish it."

LaCroix's taut tension released, his shoulders falling. He pulled a hand through limp, blood-greased hair as he considered, still meeting Andrei's gaze as much as he ever would.

"You consider this defeat, then. Utter, _pitiful_ defeat, from which I cannot possibly return."

"This existence is to endure. I have always known this, but I did not consider that to be faced with hardship is something you have been made... unsuited for."

"I am unsuited to be made ash!" lashed LaCroix's tongue. Suddenly, his tremble soothed, his brittle voice rich as he wielded his wrath. "If it takes a decade - if it takes a century I shall prove it all the same, and I assure you that I will remember this well when I drag myself from this _pit_. Cherish this domain you've seized - for so long as you may, indeed."

His threats were ill-advised, his hope deluded, but Andrei did not miss the crucial, invigorating detail to LaCroix's words. It was only a faint spark from behind those empty sockets, a simple touch of vitae that almost slipped by unnoticed in its weakness - a hint of lost domination, finding a resilience born of sheer, blunt obstinance. The Tzimisce gave a soft smile, gone entirely unseen.

"It is not merely _seized_. Your streets are ravaged, your city burns. Watch."

Andrei edged his claw closer, pads of his fingers brushing over the back of LaCroix's hand. Focusing his blood, he reached _outwards_ , to test whether this resilience would last another blow.

He showed him how Los Angeles bled. Frenzied fangs tearing Cainite and kine alike, the gruelling ends so many of LaCroix's allies had met, a sweeping vision of the final glory being made in the bedlam beyond these windows. Yet it was not merely wanton destruction - LaCroix would understand the significance of this chokepoint in the passage it wrote for nights to come, and the fact that they both stood on the crest of true, resonating change.

LaCroix did not flinch. His mouth opened with his inward gaze, enraptured by the sight, as Andrei saw he had underestimated the man yet again.

"This is what awaits you, at the end of any victory," he explained. He brought his claw upwards to LaCroix's chin, tipping him to more directly face Andrei and stroking a thumb over the line of his jaw. "Is this truly a path you are willing to promise me - _us_ \- in blood?"

"You say that as though I have a choice."

"Because you do." Andrei moved his claws past his chin, to touch with utmost gentleness at LaCroix's throat. His skin would break easily this final time, just as he had seen it broken a dozen times over upon his workshop floor. The ache twinged, pulling a note of misguided regret that mingled oddly with how inflaming the sight had been.

The Ventrue moved a hand upwards, shaking the Tzimisce's hand from him. "I think not. Come, then. Bring this future you have exalted without end."

"The only future with some chance to spiral everlasting." Andrei did not believe LaCroix understood as much, precisely, but just as the same was true of the Nagloper, his stumbling steps might be only the beginning. To indulge hope was gluttonous, but that did nothing to stop its dizzying rush swelling within his chest - at the comforting multitude bonds of his growing chapter, at the taking of a frontier and finally, in the blossoming thoughts of a pack reformed.

"So it would seem," muttered the Ventrue. "Shall we proceed?"

**Author's Note:**

> thanks nosferlife for help with editing ^_^


End file.
